Nietzsche(1844-1900)is often called the first modern thinker. In fact, depending on whether you say we live in modern or post-modern times, he is called the first modern OR post-modern thinker. He is without doubt one of the most influential philosophers of modern Europe, and most skeptical thought is now deeply in his debt.
Nietzsche came from a long line of protestant Lutheran preachers. Unfortunately, Nietzsche’s father died when he was very little, and though his family sent the boy to school to become a preacher and theologian (like Hegel, Heidegger and many other German thinkers) Nietzsche rebelled and turned to philosophy.
German Pessimism and Schopenhauer:
Just before Nietzsche’s birth, Germany had been going through a great period of pessimism. Just like in China, Egypt, Greece and everywhere, human thought flourishes in the period after tragedy and warring states because people are forced to turn against old conceptions and institutions and ask hard questions that become very popular in these sorts of times.
German princes came together to crush the popular people’s movements for individual rights, and there was a great turning away from the German reason of Kant towards the German will of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Since reason failed in the world, the world is not a reasonable place but a tough place in which it is hard to push for what one sees as beautiful and true.
Marx wrote in this time, for this crowd.
Schopenhauer is deeply influenced by Buddhism and Indian thought, in a very pessimistic way.
He uses the image of a ship bobbing on the water, just hanging on in a watery, stormy ocean of a world. Rather than believe in a reason beyond, having the stomach to see the harsh reality of the situation became a value, a value that skeptical thought has retained.
German pessimism, including its famous thinkers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, flourished in two more recent periods of pessimism: WWI for Europe and Vietnam for America. In fact, Nietzsche was the original guy who said ‘my home country is stupid and think they are awesome’, bashing Germany and all things German quite openly, for which he has been honored as not only individualistic but incredibly courageous. Thus European thought following WWI and American culture following the 60’s (Berkeley a key player in this) found deep meaning in calling their society and ‘the system’ a bunch of chumps.
Nietzsche’s first book was The Birth of Tragedy, in which he argued that the Greeks were not simply rationalists as was often said. He argued that there were two opposite strains in Greek society, the Apollonian (order, reason and law) and the Dionysian (chaos, emotion and revolt). Nietzsche suggests that this is quite human, and societies that develop do not simply become reasonable but struggle to both restrain and escape. This is very similar to Hegel’s dialectic of reason and understanding.
Nietzsche vs. Morality:
The text I gave you to read is ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, in which Nietzsche asks us to look at humanity critically and see that following the rules (like Kant) or ‘the greater good’ (like Mill) is for sheep. The individual rises above the masses and sees things in a new way. Nietzsche came up with these ideas reading Kant and Mill, reacting against their overall goods for everyone evenly. For Nietzsche, inequality are the beautiful mountain ranges to climb and conquer.
Nietzsche was a staunch individualist, believing that ANY group morality is a slave morality, and he called Christianity, Scientific ‘Objectivity’, German Nationalism and German Racism (very much centered in Anti-Semitism) out on this vocally. Again, he is seen as a hero by many for this. Consider: “When we create the master race, we will have to mix in a lot of Jews to get their good qualities”, a joke considering that Nietzsche would never advise creating a master race of equals but rather loves the individual who stands above the race as a herd.
It was a shame that Nietzsche was censored and used by the Nazis to support their ideas of the beautiful rising German will of the master race, taking Nietzsche’s individualism and twisting it into a racial and social doctrine. Nietzsche intended his words for individualists, as he says over and over again. In this, they famously used his concept of the Superman (and yes, Nietzsche is the first person on record to use this phrase, the UBERMENCH) to mean not the artist or visionary who creates but the German race.
Nietzsche vs. Nihilism:
While many would say ‘Nietzsche believes in nothing, then”, this would not be true. Nietzsche was just as vocal about believing in something as he was about not believing the herd mentality. Nietzsche saw himself as a new sort of thinker who would be followed and imitated by many. Because of this, he warns over and over again NOT to make his thought into a school or a system. However, he did not believe like Schopenhauer that one could believe or not and it makes little difference. Nietzsche believed that the whole worth of the individual is that, in the face of nothing being absolutely true, staring into the void of being, you create something and stand for something in a beautiful way, creating your own meaning in life. He was very critical of ‘Nihilism’, believing in nothing, thought this is just what his critics, religious and not, have called him.
Nietzsche believes in Heraclitus and Hegel’s Becoming between Being and Nothing. He avoids believing in eternal positives, but also believing in nothing whatsoever. It is the overturning of the old into the new by the true individual who wills something created beyond themselves and the world that stands in the face of Nihilism that Nietzsche sees as modernity’s greatest threat. He sees a world where everyone sits on their couch, believes in nothing but is afraid to contradict the state or church and do SOMETHING other than sit there.
Thus, Nietzsche relentlessly bashes reason and judgment in himself and in others, but he believes that you must have the courage to create as a contradictory and mortal being.
Nietzsche’s bashing of women: An Interesting Example of Nietzsche’s Skeptical Individualism
One of the most beautiful and deep parts of Nietzsche’s writings is his turn in Human, All Too Human from bashing Kant and others for believing in objective truth to say ‘here are some of my truths’ and without warning start bashing women repeatedly including the famous “When you go to woman, do not forget your whip”. The beauty of this philosophical performance, what inspires Bataille and Derrida, is that Nietzsche here is showing you both sides of himself at once. Unlike Kant or Mill who are writing like they can be consistent and not contradict themselves in the building or seeing of the truth, Nietzsche knows the truth is psychological and complex, and that beauty comes from tension and pain. Thus, even in his bashing he knows he is a human being and flawed. This has had an amazing impact on Art and Literature (particularly since Bataille and his open obscenity in following Nietzsche).
Passages of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil:
N starts off with asking, why do we want or suppose we can simply get truth? Philosophy seems like it has barely even gotten started. Asking this question is perhaps the greatest risk: nihilism can result from q of ‘truth’.
Read BGE (2)
Faith in opposite values: categorical Ts and Fs, such that we can fully know.
Notice ‘frog perspective’, maybe same as frog in well of CT.
Read (3), selection. Instinct to simplify things in ‘truth’ but complex
Read (4), ending. “philosophy beyond good & evil”, this is first time title in the book.
Read (5) start and selection. Philosophers as naïve, trusting so far, critique of Kant. Why?
Read (6), middle. Naïve, because ALL DRIVES can pose as ‘truth’ or ‘good’.
Read (16) start: Notice beyond even Schopenhauer here. Thinking conceals itself such that we cannot be simply certain of it any way. (Notice lead to Freud here)
In 17, speaks more of the deceptive power of language to simplify things for us and shape our world. He mentions resemblance of Indian, Greek and German philosophy, says it is clearly explained by language- fits with growing German- our picture.
Why is language deceptive? How does grammar lie? Read (24), start and end.
Language, and science, have to simplify the world by making strict oppositions out of what is actually subtleties of gradation. Language, philosophy and science make things black and white, but things are actually shades of grey between ideals and extremes.
Nietzsche says that truth is alive, and doesn’t need such simple and artificial scaffolding as our beliefs or our knowing we are right. We should enjoy being wrong.
Read (25) start: Truth needs no protectors- or categorical certainties.
Says falsehood is the surest fact, continually in all truth and discovery.
Read (34), middle to end. Philosophers need to suspect the certainties they have taken for granted, and grammar plays a serious part in the simplifying deception, he says even poison against life. (Note: Hegel’s judgment is the one sided acid).
Also Great: (78), (94) (126)
Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
This is one of the most famous of Nietzsche’s books. The opening passages are quite famous and are quoted often. The prose is intentionally mocking the Bible, Plato and other classics.
Nietzsche believed that the Persian prophet Zarathustra, one of the first monotheists, was also the first dualist to separate good from evil, so Nietzsche has Zarathustra become the first to go ‘beyond’ good and evil, to recognize the error of his dualism, and see the interdependence and totality of the whole. Zarathustra starts in his cave, then ‘goes down’, a theme that recurs.
Zarathustra first encounters after going down out of cave a forest dweller (very Indian), who is avoiding people and loving god as people are too imperfect. This sage in the woods is what Zarathustra has overcome. He gets to town, and addresses the people, who have gathered to watch a tightrope walker. Note that the superman is one who the people watch and love, who straddles an abyss and creates and dances like the tightrope walker, but the tightrope walker is a mere spectacle and the people are not supposed to do the same.
Read (3) start, several sections going through (4).
Operation Margarine by Roland Barthes
This short piece by the French literary critic and philosopher is an excellent afterward to Nietzsche, as it shows us the way that conformity and values are sold and packaged today.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Thursday, November 11, 2010
No Class or Club on Friday Nov 12
Hey Everyone,
There will be no Logic class or Philosophy Club on Friday, November 12th (tomorrow). Originally, the BCC schedule said we were taking Friday off, and then this was changed to Thursday. As such, I had no lecture planned for Friday.
Enjoy your Friday!
Eric
There will be no Logic class or Philosophy Club on Friday, November 12th (tomorrow). Originally, the BCC schedule said we were taking Friday off, and then this was changed to Thursday. As such, I had no lecture planned for Friday.
Enjoy your Friday!
Eric
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Ethics: Environment & Carson
In the earliest cultures, humans and animals were understood to share a world together as very much equals. As humanity began domesticating livestock, humans are increasingly understood to be above all animals, the god-like animal. Adam in the Bible is namer and master of all.
At same time, world as balance with humans (like Leviathan and Behemoth). We have done so well as a species that we have become quite unbalanced with nature.
While many cultures have spoken of being in balance (Egyptian Wisdom for instance), it was only with the growth of mechanization and technology that Islamic scholars first wrote consciously of the impact that humans had systematically on the environment. This makes sense, as Europe got its machines and chemistry from Islamic civilization.
As we see in The Corporation, in the 1940s and 1950s, just as US became the wealthiest nation, petroleum products were used to make huge varieties of products. Wood and metal gave way to plastic. Remember that it is not ‘the oil stupid’ as far as just gasoline. All our life is permeated with petroleum products and synthetic chemicals. Monsanto and DuPont are the big giants.
What has happened: we are in a culture that can give us immediate things according to our intentions, but such that we ignore the long and complicated process of nature. Nature can sift things out, but not as fast as we can synthesize just what we want while externalizing the unneeded and then ignoring it until it snowballs up into our face. Cancer rates, birth defect rates, and other problems are evidence of the environmental impact.
Add on top of externalization the competition between corporations in a culture that ignores the consequences and people are racing to screw things up and put money in their own pocket before someone else does. This imbalance creates further imbalances. Modern plantations and corporate farms have created surges in pests, and then we spray tons of pesticide to kill the swarms of pests, and then the pests resurge because all of the other pests were killed, and the cycle grows steadily out of control.
As silent spring suggests, we need human rights to not be poisoned. While many thought DDT ban was point of book, actually Carson calls for rights. Consider differences in infant mortality rates and who lives in the inner city.
Environmental Issues (from the Blackwell Environmental Reader)
Wilderness: We have seen that this is an interesting issue for utilitarianism. Does one consider best use in the long term to be using everything, or do we leave things unused for long term?
Sustainability: Nature and economy must both be preserved, or both will collapse.
Environmental Justice: Who gets benefits and who gets harm of processes in the culture? One fifth of world consumes four fifths of resources. Some, like Rev. Chaviz Jr., argue for the concept of Environmental racism, that pollution and cleaning products affect those who are ostracized in the worst areas of town far more than others. The horrifying infant mortality rate among American black people, twice that of white Americans, is evidence of this.
At same time, world as balance with humans (like Leviathan and Behemoth). We have done so well as a species that we have become quite unbalanced with nature.
While many cultures have spoken of being in balance (Egyptian Wisdom for instance), it was only with the growth of mechanization and technology that Islamic scholars first wrote consciously of the impact that humans had systematically on the environment. This makes sense, as Europe got its machines and chemistry from Islamic civilization.
As we see in The Corporation, in the 1940s and 1950s, just as US became the wealthiest nation, petroleum products were used to make huge varieties of products. Wood and metal gave way to plastic. Remember that it is not ‘the oil stupid’ as far as just gasoline. All our life is permeated with petroleum products and synthetic chemicals. Monsanto and DuPont are the big giants.
What has happened: we are in a culture that can give us immediate things according to our intentions, but such that we ignore the long and complicated process of nature. Nature can sift things out, but not as fast as we can synthesize just what we want while externalizing the unneeded and then ignoring it until it snowballs up into our face. Cancer rates, birth defect rates, and other problems are evidence of the environmental impact.
Add on top of externalization the competition between corporations in a culture that ignores the consequences and people are racing to screw things up and put money in their own pocket before someone else does. This imbalance creates further imbalances. Modern plantations and corporate farms have created surges in pests, and then we spray tons of pesticide to kill the swarms of pests, and then the pests resurge because all of the other pests were killed, and the cycle grows steadily out of control.
As silent spring suggests, we need human rights to not be poisoned. While many thought DDT ban was point of book, actually Carson calls for rights. Consider differences in infant mortality rates and who lives in the inner city.
Environmental Issues (from the Blackwell Environmental Reader)
Wilderness: We have seen that this is an interesting issue for utilitarianism. Does one consider best use in the long term to be using everything, or do we leave things unused for long term?
Sustainability: Nature and economy must both be preserved, or both will collapse.
Environmental Justice: Who gets benefits and who gets harm of processes in the culture? One fifth of world consumes four fifths of resources. Some, like Rev. Chaviz Jr., argue for the concept of Environmental racism, that pollution and cleaning products affect those who are ostracized in the worst areas of town far more than others. The horrifying infant mortality rate among American black people, twice that of white Americans, is evidence of this.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Intro Philosophy: Kant & Hegel
Last time we ended with Hume and his very skeptical philosophy. Hume argues that we have impressions and ideas, and because all of our ideas come from our impressions, our ideas are assumptions. The famous example Hume uses is the billiard table, arguing that we have an idea or assumption of a cause when ball A hits ball B.
This total skepticism is quite welcome to some, but positivistic thinkers are not happy with cause being an assumption in the head and not a fact in the world. Another problem is that Hume does not tell us where our idea of cause comes from or how it is related to our other ideas.
This got to Kant, who said thing in itself with categories we can know (big influence on Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein’s early thought)
Kant (1724-1804) read Hume and famously wrote that Hume awakened him from his “dogmatic slumbers”. Kant is one of the biggest philosophers in the modern European cannon, loved by positivists and hated by skeptics. He was a big influence on Schopenhauer (who was a big influence on Nietzsche, the focus of next week), and a big influence on the early thought of Wittgenstein (who we focus on the week after next).
Kant believes very much in the aim of Descartes, the world does contain certainties and facts such as 2 + 3 = 5, but Descartes as we saw did not spend much time proving this. Kant’s major work, A Critique of Pure Reason, tries to bridge this gap with an air tight argument for true positive knowledge in the face of Hume’s skeptical challenge that all we know is merely assumption.
Kant argues that Hume is correct that we learn the world through the senses and this is how we acquire our ideas. However, even though we do not experience the world directly but rather through our experience and ideas, we can construct true positive knowledge of the world and our ideas through reason which can reveal new certain truths by reasoning from our initial ideas like mathematics can derive additional propositions from beginning propositions. Remember that in the 1700s algebraic science had come to question many traditional truths and give new positive answers. Kant studied and wrote in the time when Newton’s laws of physics had risen to fame.
Kant argues that the world, the “thing-in-itself” as he calls it, we cannot know, but our ideas about it have a structure and order to them. Kant believed that there are twelve categories of ideas and cause is one of these categories. If we start from these basic categories, we can learn additional certain truths about science and the world in the same way that if we start with 2 + 3 = 5 we can come to additional certain propositions of mathematics. Kant calls this the synthetic apriori, a fancy term for what we can discover we know prior to our experience of the world. The metaphor often used is our ideas are the eyeglasses through which we see the world.
Hegel (1770-1831) was as upset with Kant as Kant was upset with Hume. Like Kant thought of Hume, Hegel did not think that Kant gave much of an explanation or exploration of our ideas. It is one thing to say we have an idea of cause as a category for our experiences, but it is another to explain how cause functions, both in itself and together with the other ideas that we have. Hegel thought that Kant declares that we have a category of causation, but he does not show why we have this category or how it fits together with the other eleven categories.
Also, just as Kant was critical of Hume for putting the facts of the world out of reach by declaring everything to be an assumption, Hegel was critical of Kant for putting the world behind our ideas as “the thing-in-itself”. Do we experience our ideas as separate from the world in this way, like a pair of eyeglasses, or are our ideas experienced in and as the world itself? If cause is a lens through which we view the world, then the world itself remains something unknown and my certain knowledge of causation is still quite useless for practical knowledge of the world. Why should we know nothing of our experience of the world, but be certain of our experience of the mind?
Hegel has two major ideas that became very influential for later thinkers. The first is historical explanation or explanation by process. Hegel argues that things are not simply what they are at once, but evolve through stages to become what they are, and the process by which they evolve show us how the things essentially work. Also, things are not simply what they are in themselves but are what they are in a situation with other things in which they become what they are (very like the Buddhist concept of co-dependent arising). After Hegel, Marx, Darwin, Freud and Feuerbach were major thinkers who overturned old theories of static order with new theories of process to explain the workings of the mind and society. Consider that Newton thought God made the earth at the very beginning in an instant, while most believe today that there was a process by which our planet, the solar system and the galaxy formed. Consider the controversy about evolution and Darwin, and how this questions our human-centered view of reality.
Hegel’s second major idea, the mechanism or motion of evolution over time, is dialectic. Dialectic is a Greek term for arguing back and forth, for and against a position, to come to greater understanding. Plato believed dialectic was the superior method of acquiring knowledge, and his dialogue plays show Socrates arguing against others and himself in this way. Hegel argues that all things are made of oppositions or contradictions (contra-diction means “arguing against”, like arguing both sides, the pros and cons, of a particular thing). This is not only similar to Lao Zi’s wheel (made of both solid and empty together), but Newton’s idea that for every force there is an equal but opposite force.
While this has become controversial, many believe that Hegel’s dialectic works in a three stage pattern of positive, negative and synthesis. Hegel often presents our ideas (which live in the world as politics and our shared expectations) as starting out positive, flipping and becoming negative, and then reaching a resolution of positive and negative as a joined whole. Remember Lao Zi’s wheel leads us through this three stage process (solid at first, then empty, then both), as does the famous Zen quote that first a rock is a rock, then a rock isn’t a rock (it is in the mind, as a concept) and then a rock is a rock (real rock and concept together as the rock).
Hegel argues that by looking at things as evolving over time in a situation, not immediate and isolated, and looking at things as two sided and in opposition to themselves and others, rather than categorical and without tension, we can come to understand how things actually are, which is a union (while an opposition) of how they are in the mind and how they are in the world.
In his first major work, The Phenomenology of Mind/Spirit (1806), Hegel gives us his social history of society and philosophy evolving by stages to the present day. In his second major work, The Science of Logic (1816), Hegel gives us his psychology. We will look at the overall structure and some key ideas of each, spending more time on the Logic which has become one of my favorites. Americans have only begun studying Hegel, because Hegel had a student named Marx who took Hegel’s concept of dialectic and used it to father communism. Communists like Hegel’s Logic very much, and so American and British universities did not teach much Hegel and when they do they often teach the Phenomenology but not the Logic. This is unfortunate, because while Hegel’s ideas about history in the Phenomenology are quite antiquated today I have great hope that there is more to be discovered by looking at the Logic in the light of the discoveries of modern psychology, especially the work of Piaget the child psychologist.
THE PHENOMENOLOGY
I disagree with Hegel’s history because it is quite simplistic and eurocentric, but it is an excellent introduction to Hegel’s thought not only because it was his first major work, after which he wrote the Logic to clarify the inner process of the mind at work in this history, but it shows dialectic working in three stages to complete itself as a union of contradictory sides.
For Hegel, the first stage of history is the Orientals. Hegel uses this term as it was used until recently, before the 1960s, to refer to everyone who is not European. In the 60s, 70s and 80s this term was still used by many to refer to East Asian people such as the Chinese. As archeology in Hegel’s time had revealed the ancient glory of Mesopotamia, Egypt and India, Hegel puts this as the first and basic starting stage in human development. It is good that this is the non-European start, but unfortunate that all further development is European (first Greek, then German) and the development is a course of Europe becoming different from others (again, this is overly simplistic and quite racist and eurocentric, but funny enough this is still largely the view preached on campuses today).
The Orientals understand objectivity and the state, two powerful positives. The Orientals are the start of society and science, but they do not question their society or science. They see the real as real, but do not understand that the real is also mental and can be questioned. In some cases, such as Buddhism in India, Hegel believes that they realized skepticism but did not develop it further, turning the world into a simple void or nothing. Thus the Orientals get simple one-sided Being or Non-Being, but do not put these two together to see the unity of the opposition. It is the Greeks, and specifically Heraclitus, who Hegel argues make this next leap and become the second stage of history.
The Greeks now rise above the Orientals and grasp the opposite of Being as Non-Being, the opposite of the state in the individual, the opposite of objectivity as subjectivity. While Hegel believes that the Greeks are the ones who did this, it is more correct to understand the relationship with the earlier empires as more complex and also that the Greeks were only one civilization of many that made leaps forward like this (Jaspers calls the age of the Greeks, the Indians and the Chinese, the three places we studied in the ancient world in depth, the axial age).
Just as the Orientals understood the positive, the Greeks understand the negative, the temporary and perspective. Hegel sees this as Heraclitus bringing Being and Non-Being together as Becoming, and sees Plato merging Heraclitus with Parmenides as a further development. However, this is not the last stage because the Greeks still put Being off in another world, either as Heraclitus’ flux of fire or Plato’s static ideal forms. It is the Germans, and specifically Hegel himself, who see the true unity of objectivity and subjectivity, of state and individual, of necessity and freedom, of science and discovery, to complete the history of thought in three stages. Notice that Hegel leaps entirely over Islam in a page, with no credit at all.
The Europeans, but specifically the Germans who are in Hegel’s time becoming the foremost champions of philosophy, history, science, and politics are in the position to realize the union of the mind and world. Hegel sees Hume and Kant as the last negative and positive before his own system of unification. Also, as a teenager Hegel heard about the French Revolution and was, like many youth, an enthusiastic supporter of the left-wing progressive removal of the aristocrats and traditional ways. We get our terms left-wing and right-wing from the French Revolution, as liberals and conservatives sat on opposite sides of the congress hall. Unfortunately for the French, and for young Hegel, the revolution collapsed and Napoleon, a dictator, took over. Hegel developed his ideas about ideas working in the real world as oppositions watching the French Revolution.
Hegel believes that history is almost at its completion in his time with his own philosophy and the politics of the German parliamentary state which balances collective objectivity with individual subjectivity. He also believes that religion evolves exactly as philosophy and politics does, and that German Lutheran Christianity is the final form of religion that unites the individual directly with God (living objectivity) because each man is the priest of his household.
THE MASTER SLAVE DIALECTIC
The Master/Slave dialectic is the continuous process of overturning that occurs at every transformation and revolution from one stage to the next. It works on the level of idea, individual and social movement.
At first, the individual goes out into the world and discovers that there are other beings out there with other opinions and views. The individual thus wants to at first kill, later conquer these others, as it wants to prove its view, its subjectivity, to be objectivity. The slave, then, comes to do everything for the master, and develops while the master deteriorates and grows lazy. The slave comes to realize that he can do things he never thought of for someone else, so he can do things no one has thought up yet for himself, and thus triumphs over the master and becomes the next master.
This is Hegel’s explanation for why the Orientals started but then failed to do real subjective philosophy, the Greeks followed but failed to complete subjectivity with objectivity, and the Germans bridge the gap seeing subjectivity and objectivity as two sides of the same thing. Notice that this tells us the Greeks were slaves of the Orientals, and the Germans were slaves of the Greeks! This is not often pointed out, but it is implied by Hegel and confirmed by historians today. While Hegel is quite eurocentric, he is right to this extent.
The Master/Slave dialectic had a great influence on many thinkers, especially progressive left-leaning political thinkers such as Hegel’s student Marx. Feminist Hegelians, like Simone de Beauvoir, uses it for women in ‘The Second Sex’, Franz Fanon uses it for black people in ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, as does the Black Panther, activist and professor Angela Davis (who went to Germany to study Hegel before going to jail for providing two shotguns to Black Panther party members in Oakland during the 60s).
THE LOGIC
After writing the Phenomenology, Hegel came to realize that he had not described the inner workings of the dialectical process of history to his liking. Hegel believed the world consisted of ideas, so he leaves history behind and turns to the workings of ideas in the mind. To show the inner psychology at work in every stage of historical development, he wrote his Logic which like the Phenomenology unfolds in three stages as positive, negative and synthesis, but instead of Orientals, Greeks and Germans, the three stages of the Logic are Being, Essence, and Concept.
Like Neo-Platonism, thought has to gather everything up such that all categories become modes or branches of the same thing. It does this with Understanding which holds things fast in sameness and Reason which divides things against each other and against themselves, opposing the Understanding. Understanding wants to keep ideas as they are and separate from each other, while Reason wants to change ideas and unite them all together as a whole. The mind craves unity, objectivity as the all-view, which pulls it in two directions. First, it wants to hold on to the unities of the understanding and keep them away from reason tearing them apart. However, reason wants to dissolve everything and return it all to the Absolute, or the undivided One. Thus, the motions rock back and forth in stages. It would thus be correct to say that, the way Hegel describes it, conservatives would rather understand than reason and liberals would rather reason than understand.
At each stage, the Understanding comes to change its shape and provide the ground for the back and forth positions of reason which share the same understanding(s). Philosophies, political positions and scientific theories reason against each other even as they share the common understandings of the time and place. Thus, Hegel says there really is only one philosophy which is ‘thought’ itself, and the philosophies are views, perspectives within the one dialectical course of things which is thought.
Why is it opposed to itself? Where did this come from? Interestingly, Hegel writes that we need to start with ‘legend’ of the fall of man, of Adam falling out of the Garden of Eden. Hegel says the inner meaning is what is important (a similar reading to Deists of his time in Europe, who see the bible as true psychologically but not literal). When Adam, or consciousness, falls into the world out of unity with all, it falls into oppositions and tensions, polarities that present one side and hide the other. Today, we can describe the fall from unity either in physics as the Big Bang or in psychology as the infant mind learning to discern itself and others in the world (Piaget).
Hegel calls judgment ‘the one-sided acid’. Categories are thus gathered, assumed, by the Understanding. (God)(IS), (You)(Are), (this)(is), the anchor points of Descartes. However, these are inadequate. First, they are one sided, and so dogmatic, stuck. They are divided from each other and the All, so reason is not satisfied and tries to figure out how all of these separate categories are one in reality, or the big One or All. Second, they are almost entirely empty of content, making them almost no different from empty. This is exactly how Hegel is critical of Kant’s categories and the gap he leaves between mind and world.
(68) “Kant, it is well known, did not put himself to much trouble in discovering the categories.”
“Kant, as we must add, never got beyond the negative result that the thing-in-itself is unknowable, and never penetrated to the discovery of what the antinomies really and positively mean. That true and positive meaning of the antinomies is this: that every actual thing involves a coexistence of opposed elements. Consequently to know, or, in other words, to comprehend an object is equivalent to being conscious of it as a concrete unity of opposed determinations. The old metaphysic, as we have already seen, when it studied the objects of which it sought a metaphysical knowledge, went to work by applying categories abstractly and to the exclusion of their opposites.”
(118) “However reluctant Understanding may be to admit the action of Dialectic, we must not suppose that the recognition of its existence is peculiarly confined to the philosopher. It would be truer to say that Dialectic gives expression to a law which is felt in all other grades of consciousness, and in general experience. Everything that surrounds us may be viewed as an instance of Dialectic.”
Hegel writes that the feeling of being alive is to feel contradiction within oneself, at rest in itself but at the same time moving itself beyond itself. It both wants to stay and go at once, and does. Similarly, the Soviet literary critic and thinker Bakhtin said that when we think we are in dialogue with ourselves, are opposed to ourselves on opposite sides.
BEING, NOTHING AND BECOMING
In the Phenomenology, Hegel argues that Heraclitus realized the unity of Being and Non-Being as ceaseless Becoming, as the flux of the cosmic fire. Hegel says that some say no one is capable of understanding contradiction, but Hegel points to Heraclitus and argues that to come to the next level in your understanding your reason has to see both sides and unite them in the cement of the understanding, which is what Heraclitus did for the Greeks such that they could rise beyond the Orientals to the next level. Hegel says that if we imagine any transformation or change or motion, we are seeing being and nonbeing as one like Heraclitus. It is merely recognizing it that is the hard part. Hegel says that this is the hurdle that prevents the common person from being a philosopher, and the reason that the great thinkers and revolutions in thought are rare. In fact, often it takes decades after the thinker’s death for their ideas to become accepted, further proof that the great thinker must unite the old with the opposite direction of the new and this is the barrier between the new idea and the common understanding of the people.
Once thought realizes becoming as the unity of the being of things and their non-being (their temporary being in time and their not being other things), thought still does not have enough to understand each and every thing or how they fit into the All as one. Thought tries to understand the individual beings of the world and the world itself as constant becoming, like Heraclitus, but this does not show us how things are interrelated. This is exactly how Kant was frustrated with Hume, because everything being an assumption does not tell us what things are specifically.
Thought must explore two opposite directions to try to find the meaning of individual things. First, it tries to understand things by their qualities (such as green, square, closed), but this moves away from the things themselves towards abstract ideas. Second, thought tries to understand things by their quantities, with each thing being a one itself and being a quantity of many parts and being in a group of many members. Unfortunately, this leaves each being as merely a thing, and tells us nothing about the specific differences between types of things. Notice that quality and quantity are the two opposite sides to our abstractions of things, the two ways we isolate and abstract, through thought, the parts and ways of things. Consider that your hand is not explainable simply by its shape, or color, or texture, any more than its being one hand with five fingers, though all of this together tells me much about my hand. To understand your hand, you have to see it in context, in the world used with other things, as well as understand the qualities and quantities of the hand.
Thought now tries to understand things in terms of essences, and these essences in terms of their qualities and quantities. Remember that Hegel in his Phenomenology saw Plato as the union of Heraclitus and Parmenides, that Plato thought things have ideal essences in the stars that cause them to be what they are, and that Platonism was the major school of thought in middle-age Europe to which Hegel acknowledges he owes many insights.
Because thought could not understand things in their qualities and quantities, it tries to understand things by putting them in groups and then understanding the qualities and quantities of these groups. It puts these as essences outside the world as Plato put them up in the stars, in another more modern way “in” things and their groups as their “nature”. The problem with this stage is that this still puts things as isolated and does not understand them in a situation as mutually interdependent. It seeks the meaning of the thing in the group where it could not find it in the individual, but this still isolates things even as it puts them in groups. Hegel is very aware that modern science is often in this mode, isolating things and finding new truths about their exclusive natures. For Hegel, Plato’s forms, Kant’s categories and scientific theories are good but they are not complete because they do not understand how things cannot be separate from each other if we want our knowledge to be like the world, in which everything fits together.
Just as qualities are non-beings within beings, essences are also non-beings within beings, but a core is sought beyond and opposed to outer qualities or bunches of quantities. Thought has turned on itself yet preserved itself, trying to understand the real as merely the idea. It would be like saying that the hand is really the ideal hand, rather than a hand in the real world which we idealize. Thought is struggling to grasp the unity of the mind and the world, of our ideas of things and the real things themselves. Remember Kant left a complete gap between the fully certain categories of the mind and the unknown world-in-itself. Just as beings were opposed to themselves and others, Hegel says that essences, if they remain many and are not gathered into a trunk of the All still have contradictions in themselves and against each-other and so they are opposed to unity.
What, then, moves us beyond Kant’s categories and isolated essences? The process of dialectic, which grasps the unity of sameness and difference, of one and many, and of necessity and freedom, as it did with Being and Non-Being before at the first stage. The idea and the thing are realized as one in the Concept, which includes the thought and thing. When we see that the world is in our minds and in itself together as one, that things are our ideas about them and themselves for us as one that is also many, this is for Hegel Actuality, the final stage. It is grasped by the mind, but in extension is the view of the real world and all that it is or could be.
Interesting for Chaos Theory, Quantum Theory and more modern developments of mathematics and science, Hegel writes that seeing the unity of necessity and freedom is the final hurdle. To see that no part of reality is absolutely necessary, but no part is absolutely free, and the two hang together as opposites always like light and darkness, this is the final stage that lets us see things as they are. This would be the final and total grasp of the wheel as solid and empty, or the rock as thing and perception/assumption.
Now, Hegel believes, reason goes forth as true science and simply Nature itself, with a ground to continue to investigate and understand things with all the branching of the Idea by which we could ever understand them to be. All becomes a single Idea, that is one with the world.
Unlike Hegel and Right wing Hegelians, who believe that the system has been achieved, Left Hegelians (most famously Marx) believe that evolution is constant and unending for the system, not just the knowledge it acquires and that we are constantly taking positions that are one-sided that need to be complimented by the opposite perspective. Many of the latest European thinkers have been powerfully affected by this leftist Hegelian view.
This total skepticism is quite welcome to some, but positivistic thinkers are not happy with cause being an assumption in the head and not a fact in the world. Another problem is that Hume does not tell us where our idea of cause comes from or how it is related to our other ideas.
This got to Kant, who said thing in itself with categories we can know (big influence on Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein’s early thought)
Kant (1724-1804) read Hume and famously wrote that Hume awakened him from his “dogmatic slumbers”. Kant is one of the biggest philosophers in the modern European cannon, loved by positivists and hated by skeptics. He was a big influence on Schopenhauer (who was a big influence on Nietzsche, the focus of next week), and a big influence on the early thought of Wittgenstein (who we focus on the week after next).
Kant believes very much in the aim of Descartes, the world does contain certainties and facts such as 2 + 3 = 5, but Descartes as we saw did not spend much time proving this. Kant’s major work, A Critique of Pure Reason, tries to bridge this gap with an air tight argument for true positive knowledge in the face of Hume’s skeptical challenge that all we know is merely assumption.
Kant argues that Hume is correct that we learn the world through the senses and this is how we acquire our ideas. However, even though we do not experience the world directly but rather through our experience and ideas, we can construct true positive knowledge of the world and our ideas through reason which can reveal new certain truths by reasoning from our initial ideas like mathematics can derive additional propositions from beginning propositions. Remember that in the 1700s algebraic science had come to question many traditional truths and give new positive answers. Kant studied and wrote in the time when Newton’s laws of physics had risen to fame.
Kant argues that the world, the “thing-in-itself” as he calls it, we cannot know, but our ideas about it have a structure and order to them. Kant believed that there are twelve categories of ideas and cause is one of these categories. If we start from these basic categories, we can learn additional certain truths about science and the world in the same way that if we start with 2 + 3 = 5 we can come to additional certain propositions of mathematics. Kant calls this the synthetic apriori, a fancy term for what we can discover we know prior to our experience of the world. The metaphor often used is our ideas are the eyeglasses through which we see the world.
Hegel (1770-1831) was as upset with Kant as Kant was upset with Hume. Like Kant thought of Hume, Hegel did not think that Kant gave much of an explanation or exploration of our ideas. It is one thing to say we have an idea of cause as a category for our experiences, but it is another to explain how cause functions, both in itself and together with the other ideas that we have. Hegel thought that Kant declares that we have a category of causation, but he does not show why we have this category or how it fits together with the other eleven categories.
Also, just as Kant was critical of Hume for putting the facts of the world out of reach by declaring everything to be an assumption, Hegel was critical of Kant for putting the world behind our ideas as “the thing-in-itself”. Do we experience our ideas as separate from the world in this way, like a pair of eyeglasses, or are our ideas experienced in and as the world itself? If cause is a lens through which we view the world, then the world itself remains something unknown and my certain knowledge of causation is still quite useless for practical knowledge of the world. Why should we know nothing of our experience of the world, but be certain of our experience of the mind?
Hegel has two major ideas that became very influential for later thinkers. The first is historical explanation or explanation by process. Hegel argues that things are not simply what they are at once, but evolve through stages to become what they are, and the process by which they evolve show us how the things essentially work. Also, things are not simply what they are in themselves but are what they are in a situation with other things in which they become what they are (very like the Buddhist concept of co-dependent arising). After Hegel, Marx, Darwin, Freud and Feuerbach were major thinkers who overturned old theories of static order with new theories of process to explain the workings of the mind and society. Consider that Newton thought God made the earth at the very beginning in an instant, while most believe today that there was a process by which our planet, the solar system and the galaxy formed. Consider the controversy about evolution and Darwin, and how this questions our human-centered view of reality.
Hegel’s second major idea, the mechanism or motion of evolution over time, is dialectic. Dialectic is a Greek term for arguing back and forth, for and against a position, to come to greater understanding. Plato believed dialectic was the superior method of acquiring knowledge, and his dialogue plays show Socrates arguing against others and himself in this way. Hegel argues that all things are made of oppositions or contradictions (contra-diction means “arguing against”, like arguing both sides, the pros and cons, of a particular thing). This is not only similar to Lao Zi’s wheel (made of both solid and empty together), but Newton’s idea that for every force there is an equal but opposite force.
While this has become controversial, many believe that Hegel’s dialectic works in a three stage pattern of positive, negative and synthesis. Hegel often presents our ideas (which live in the world as politics and our shared expectations) as starting out positive, flipping and becoming negative, and then reaching a resolution of positive and negative as a joined whole. Remember Lao Zi’s wheel leads us through this three stage process (solid at first, then empty, then both), as does the famous Zen quote that first a rock is a rock, then a rock isn’t a rock (it is in the mind, as a concept) and then a rock is a rock (real rock and concept together as the rock).
Hegel argues that by looking at things as evolving over time in a situation, not immediate and isolated, and looking at things as two sided and in opposition to themselves and others, rather than categorical and without tension, we can come to understand how things actually are, which is a union (while an opposition) of how they are in the mind and how they are in the world.
In his first major work, The Phenomenology of Mind/Spirit (1806), Hegel gives us his social history of society and philosophy evolving by stages to the present day. In his second major work, The Science of Logic (1816), Hegel gives us his psychology. We will look at the overall structure and some key ideas of each, spending more time on the Logic which has become one of my favorites. Americans have only begun studying Hegel, because Hegel had a student named Marx who took Hegel’s concept of dialectic and used it to father communism. Communists like Hegel’s Logic very much, and so American and British universities did not teach much Hegel and when they do they often teach the Phenomenology but not the Logic. This is unfortunate, because while Hegel’s ideas about history in the Phenomenology are quite antiquated today I have great hope that there is more to be discovered by looking at the Logic in the light of the discoveries of modern psychology, especially the work of Piaget the child psychologist.
THE PHENOMENOLOGY
I disagree with Hegel’s history because it is quite simplistic and eurocentric, but it is an excellent introduction to Hegel’s thought not only because it was his first major work, after which he wrote the Logic to clarify the inner process of the mind at work in this history, but it shows dialectic working in three stages to complete itself as a union of contradictory sides.
For Hegel, the first stage of history is the Orientals. Hegel uses this term as it was used until recently, before the 1960s, to refer to everyone who is not European. In the 60s, 70s and 80s this term was still used by many to refer to East Asian people such as the Chinese. As archeology in Hegel’s time had revealed the ancient glory of Mesopotamia, Egypt and India, Hegel puts this as the first and basic starting stage in human development. It is good that this is the non-European start, but unfortunate that all further development is European (first Greek, then German) and the development is a course of Europe becoming different from others (again, this is overly simplistic and quite racist and eurocentric, but funny enough this is still largely the view preached on campuses today).
The Orientals understand objectivity and the state, two powerful positives. The Orientals are the start of society and science, but they do not question their society or science. They see the real as real, but do not understand that the real is also mental and can be questioned. In some cases, such as Buddhism in India, Hegel believes that they realized skepticism but did not develop it further, turning the world into a simple void or nothing. Thus the Orientals get simple one-sided Being or Non-Being, but do not put these two together to see the unity of the opposition. It is the Greeks, and specifically Heraclitus, who Hegel argues make this next leap and become the second stage of history.
The Greeks now rise above the Orientals and grasp the opposite of Being as Non-Being, the opposite of the state in the individual, the opposite of objectivity as subjectivity. While Hegel believes that the Greeks are the ones who did this, it is more correct to understand the relationship with the earlier empires as more complex and also that the Greeks were only one civilization of many that made leaps forward like this (Jaspers calls the age of the Greeks, the Indians and the Chinese, the three places we studied in the ancient world in depth, the axial age).
Just as the Orientals understood the positive, the Greeks understand the negative, the temporary and perspective. Hegel sees this as Heraclitus bringing Being and Non-Being together as Becoming, and sees Plato merging Heraclitus with Parmenides as a further development. However, this is not the last stage because the Greeks still put Being off in another world, either as Heraclitus’ flux of fire or Plato’s static ideal forms. It is the Germans, and specifically Hegel himself, who see the true unity of objectivity and subjectivity, of state and individual, of necessity and freedom, of science and discovery, to complete the history of thought in three stages. Notice that Hegel leaps entirely over Islam in a page, with no credit at all.
The Europeans, but specifically the Germans who are in Hegel’s time becoming the foremost champions of philosophy, history, science, and politics are in the position to realize the union of the mind and world. Hegel sees Hume and Kant as the last negative and positive before his own system of unification. Also, as a teenager Hegel heard about the French Revolution and was, like many youth, an enthusiastic supporter of the left-wing progressive removal of the aristocrats and traditional ways. We get our terms left-wing and right-wing from the French Revolution, as liberals and conservatives sat on opposite sides of the congress hall. Unfortunately for the French, and for young Hegel, the revolution collapsed and Napoleon, a dictator, took over. Hegel developed his ideas about ideas working in the real world as oppositions watching the French Revolution.
Hegel believes that history is almost at its completion in his time with his own philosophy and the politics of the German parliamentary state which balances collective objectivity with individual subjectivity. He also believes that religion evolves exactly as philosophy and politics does, and that German Lutheran Christianity is the final form of religion that unites the individual directly with God (living objectivity) because each man is the priest of his household.
THE MASTER SLAVE DIALECTIC
The Master/Slave dialectic is the continuous process of overturning that occurs at every transformation and revolution from one stage to the next. It works on the level of idea, individual and social movement.
At first, the individual goes out into the world and discovers that there are other beings out there with other opinions and views. The individual thus wants to at first kill, later conquer these others, as it wants to prove its view, its subjectivity, to be objectivity. The slave, then, comes to do everything for the master, and develops while the master deteriorates and grows lazy. The slave comes to realize that he can do things he never thought of for someone else, so he can do things no one has thought up yet for himself, and thus triumphs over the master and becomes the next master.
This is Hegel’s explanation for why the Orientals started but then failed to do real subjective philosophy, the Greeks followed but failed to complete subjectivity with objectivity, and the Germans bridge the gap seeing subjectivity and objectivity as two sides of the same thing. Notice that this tells us the Greeks were slaves of the Orientals, and the Germans were slaves of the Greeks! This is not often pointed out, but it is implied by Hegel and confirmed by historians today. While Hegel is quite eurocentric, he is right to this extent.
The Master/Slave dialectic had a great influence on many thinkers, especially progressive left-leaning political thinkers such as Hegel’s student Marx. Feminist Hegelians, like Simone de Beauvoir, uses it for women in ‘The Second Sex’, Franz Fanon uses it for black people in ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, as does the Black Panther, activist and professor Angela Davis (who went to Germany to study Hegel before going to jail for providing two shotguns to Black Panther party members in Oakland during the 60s).
THE LOGIC
After writing the Phenomenology, Hegel came to realize that he had not described the inner workings of the dialectical process of history to his liking. Hegel believed the world consisted of ideas, so he leaves history behind and turns to the workings of ideas in the mind. To show the inner psychology at work in every stage of historical development, he wrote his Logic which like the Phenomenology unfolds in three stages as positive, negative and synthesis, but instead of Orientals, Greeks and Germans, the three stages of the Logic are Being, Essence, and Concept.
Like Neo-Platonism, thought has to gather everything up such that all categories become modes or branches of the same thing. It does this with Understanding which holds things fast in sameness and Reason which divides things against each other and against themselves, opposing the Understanding. Understanding wants to keep ideas as they are and separate from each other, while Reason wants to change ideas and unite them all together as a whole. The mind craves unity, objectivity as the all-view, which pulls it in two directions. First, it wants to hold on to the unities of the understanding and keep them away from reason tearing them apart. However, reason wants to dissolve everything and return it all to the Absolute, or the undivided One. Thus, the motions rock back and forth in stages. It would thus be correct to say that, the way Hegel describes it, conservatives would rather understand than reason and liberals would rather reason than understand.
At each stage, the Understanding comes to change its shape and provide the ground for the back and forth positions of reason which share the same understanding(s). Philosophies, political positions and scientific theories reason against each other even as they share the common understandings of the time and place. Thus, Hegel says there really is only one philosophy which is ‘thought’ itself, and the philosophies are views, perspectives within the one dialectical course of things which is thought.
Why is it opposed to itself? Where did this come from? Interestingly, Hegel writes that we need to start with ‘legend’ of the fall of man, of Adam falling out of the Garden of Eden. Hegel says the inner meaning is what is important (a similar reading to Deists of his time in Europe, who see the bible as true psychologically but not literal). When Adam, or consciousness, falls into the world out of unity with all, it falls into oppositions and tensions, polarities that present one side and hide the other. Today, we can describe the fall from unity either in physics as the Big Bang or in psychology as the infant mind learning to discern itself and others in the world (Piaget).
Hegel calls judgment ‘the one-sided acid’. Categories are thus gathered, assumed, by the Understanding. (God)(IS), (You)(Are), (this)(is), the anchor points of Descartes. However, these are inadequate. First, they are one sided, and so dogmatic, stuck. They are divided from each other and the All, so reason is not satisfied and tries to figure out how all of these separate categories are one in reality, or the big One or All. Second, they are almost entirely empty of content, making them almost no different from empty. This is exactly how Hegel is critical of Kant’s categories and the gap he leaves between mind and world.
(68) “Kant, it is well known, did not put himself to much trouble in discovering the categories.”
“Kant, as we must add, never got beyond the negative result that the thing-in-itself is unknowable, and never penetrated to the discovery of what the antinomies really and positively mean. That true and positive meaning of the antinomies is this: that every actual thing involves a coexistence of opposed elements. Consequently to know, or, in other words, to comprehend an object is equivalent to being conscious of it as a concrete unity of opposed determinations. The old metaphysic, as we have already seen, when it studied the objects of which it sought a metaphysical knowledge, went to work by applying categories abstractly and to the exclusion of their opposites.”
(118) “However reluctant Understanding may be to admit the action of Dialectic, we must not suppose that the recognition of its existence is peculiarly confined to the philosopher. It would be truer to say that Dialectic gives expression to a law which is felt in all other grades of consciousness, and in general experience. Everything that surrounds us may be viewed as an instance of Dialectic.”
Hegel writes that the feeling of being alive is to feel contradiction within oneself, at rest in itself but at the same time moving itself beyond itself. It both wants to stay and go at once, and does. Similarly, the Soviet literary critic and thinker Bakhtin said that when we think we are in dialogue with ourselves, are opposed to ourselves on opposite sides.
BEING, NOTHING AND BECOMING
In the Phenomenology, Hegel argues that Heraclitus realized the unity of Being and Non-Being as ceaseless Becoming, as the flux of the cosmic fire. Hegel says that some say no one is capable of understanding contradiction, but Hegel points to Heraclitus and argues that to come to the next level in your understanding your reason has to see both sides and unite them in the cement of the understanding, which is what Heraclitus did for the Greeks such that they could rise beyond the Orientals to the next level. Hegel says that if we imagine any transformation or change or motion, we are seeing being and nonbeing as one like Heraclitus. It is merely recognizing it that is the hard part. Hegel says that this is the hurdle that prevents the common person from being a philosopher, and the reason that the great thinkers and revolutions in thought are rare. In fact, often it takes decades after the thinker’s death for their ideas to become accepted, further proof that the great thinker must unite the old with the opposite direction of the new and this is the barrier between the new idea and the common understanding of the people.
Once thought realizes becoming as the unity of the being of things and their non-being (their temporary being in time and their not being other things), thought still does not have enough to understand each and every thing or how they fit into the All as one. Thought tries to understand the individual beings of the world and the world itself as constant becoming, like Heraclitus, but this does not show us how things are interrelated. This is exactly how Kant was frustrated with Hume, because everything being an assumption does not tell us what things are specifically.
Thought must explore two opposite directions to try to find the meaning of individual things. First, it tries to understand things by their qualities (such as green, square, closed), but this moves away from the things themselves towards abstract ideas. Second, thought tries to understand things by their quantities, with each thing being a one itself and being a quantity of many parts and being in a group of many members. Unfortunately, this leaves each being as merely a thing, and tells us nothing about the specific differences between types of things. Notice that quality and quantity are the two opposite sides to our abstractions of things, the two ways we isolate and abstract, through thought, the parts and ways of things. Consider that your hand is not explainable simply by its shape, or color, or texture, any more than its being one hand with five fingers, though all of this together tells me much about my hand. To understand your hand, you have to see it in context, in the world used with other things, as well as understand the qualities and quantities of the hand.
Thought now tries to understand things in terms of essences, and these essences in terms of their qualities and quantities. Remember that Hegel in his Phenomenology saw Plato as the union of Heraclitus and Parmenides, that Plato thought things have ideal essences in the stars that cause them to be what they are, and that Platonism was the major school of thought in middle-age Europe to which Hegel acknowledges he owes many insights.
Because thought could not understand things in their qualities and quantities, it tries to understand things by putting them in groups and then understanding the qualities and quantities of these groups. It puts these as essences outside the world as Plato put them up in the stars, in another more modern way “in” things and their groups as their “nature”. The problem with this stage is that this still puts things as isolated and does not understand them in a situation as mutually interdependent. It seeks the meaning of the thing in the group where it could not find it in the individual, but this still isolates things even as it puts them in groups. Hegel is very aware that modern science is often in this mode, isolating things and finding new truths about their exclusive natures. For Hegel, Plato’s forms, Kant’s categories and scientific theories are good but they are not complete because they do not understand how things cannot be separate from each other if we want our knowledge to be like the world, in which everything fits together.
Just as qualities are non-beings within beings, essences are also non-beings within beings, but a core is sought beyond and opposed to outer qualities or bunches of quantities. Thought has turned on itself yet preserved itself, trying to understand the real as merely the idea. It would be like saying that the hand is really the ideal hand, rather than a hand in the real world which we idealize. Thought is struggling to grasp the unity of the mind and the world, of our ideas of things and the real things themselves. Remember Kant left a complete gap between the fully certain categories of the mind and the unknown world-in-itself. Just as beings were opposed to themselves and others, Hegel says that essences, if they remain many and are not gathered into a trunk of the All still have contradictions in themselves and against each-other and so they are opposed to unity.
What, then, moves us beyond Kant’s categories and isolated essences? The process of dialectic, which grasps the unity of sameness and difference, of one and many, and of necessity and freedom, as it did with Being and Non-Being before at the first stage. The idea and the thing are realized as one in the Concept, which includes the thought and thing. When we see that the world is in our minds and in itself together as one, that things are our ideas about them and themselves for us as one that is also many, this is for Hegel Actuality, the final stage. It is grasped by the mind, but in extension is the view of the real world and all that it is or could be.
Interesting for Chaos Theory, Quantum Theory and more modern developments of mathematics and science, Hegel writes that seeing the unity of necessity and freedom is the final hurdle. To see that no part of reality is absolutely necessary, but no part is absolutely free, and the two hang together as opposites always like light and darkness, this is the final stage that lets us see things as they are. This would be the final and total grasp of the wheel as solid and empty, or the rock as thing and perception/assumption.
Now, Hegel believes, reason goes forth as true science and simply Nature itself, with a ground to continue to investigate and understand things with all the branching of the Idea by which we could ever understand them to be. All becomes a single Idea, that is one with the world.
Unlike Hegel and Right wing Hegelians, who believe that the system has been achieved, Left Hegelians (most famously Marx) believe that evolution is constant and unending for the system, not just the knowledge it acquires and that we are constantly taking positions that are one-sided that need to be complimented by the opposite perspective. Many of the latest European thinkers have been powerfully affected by this leftist Hegelian view.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Logic: Early Wittgenstein & Truth Tables
Wittgenstein (1889-1951) is one of the most important thinkers in academics today. His early book, the Tractatus, and his later book, the Philosophical Investigations, are considered two of the most important influences for the American and British Analytic school of philosophy, the dominant school of philosophy in America.
In an end of the century poll in 2000, philosophy professors from America and Canada were asked to list the five most important books that influenced their own work. When all of the results were tallied up, the Philosophical Investigations was #1, and the Tractatus was #4. The Philosophical Investigations was cited far more frequently than any other book, was listed first on far more ballots, and crossed over more into many different disciplines and areas of study.
Wittgenstein’s thought can be divided into his early, middle and later work. His early work is the book the Tractatus, the book which gave the world truth table logic. This tool, as Wittgenstein later came to see it, remains the mathematical system taught as logic today. Just as Wittgenstein became famous for his truth tables, he switched positions in his thinking and came to reject his earlier work. He wrote in notebooks that were only published after his death, and the Philosophical Investigations is the most celebrated of these.
First, we will look at the life of Wittgenstein. Second, we will consider some of the important ideas in the Tractatus and Wittgenstein’s early thought. Third, we will begin learning the truth table method of logic Wittgenstein introduced in the Tractatus.
The Life and Thought of Wittgenstein:
Wittgenstein’s Father was the Austrian Carnegie, making a fortune in Steel. Though his father was Protestant, and his mother Jewish, Ludwig was baptized Catholic because of antisemitism at the time. In his early years, Ludwig was a proud atheist but by the time he was working on his Tractatus he had a mystical transcendental outlook which he kept for the rest of his life. Though never religious, and though he had to bribe Nazis later to smuggle his “Jewish” family from Austria, he was buried as a Catholic.
The Wittgenstein family was known for intense criticism, musical talent, depression, and suicide. Three of Wittgenstein’s four brothers committed suicide, and he himself considered suicide for awhile before launching into his late period. Unfortunately, suicide was considered romantic for Austrian elites at the time.
Wittgenstein was in Hitler’s elementary school, 2 days younger, but because he was put forward a grade and Hitler was held back a grade he was 2 years ahead. Both he and Hitler hated the school and the lessons.
He began studying at university in Berlin to become an engineer with an interest in flight (the Wright Brothers had recently invented the motorized glider, but flew it in France and Germany until 1907 as the US Army did not believe them). After failing in his attempt to build a better propeller, he began studying mathematical theory and philosophy of mathematics, becoming entranced with two thinkers who are along with Wittgenstein foundational for Analytical philosophy and logic: Russell from Britain, and Frege from Germany. Wittgenstein went to see Frege, who did not fully understand his questions and advised him to go see Russell, which he did in 1911.
He showed up unannounced to Russell’s room at Trinity College, impressed him with his intense and brilliant arguments. Russell became convinced that the young Austrian was going to carry his work forward and be his successor, solving the remaining problems of logic that Russell’s work on the foundations of mathematics had left open. As mentioned last lecture, Russell had shown there were contradictions unresolved in Frege’s work with set theory, but Russell had become frustrated trying to solve these contradiction with his theory of types.
Wittgenstein, an eccentric and difficult personality, was never fully comfortable at Cambridge, and often got into disagreements with Russell and threatened to leave many times before fleeing to Norway where he believed he could finish his work on Logic. While some still disagree, it is generally accepted that Wittgenstein was gay, developed a relationship with Pinsent, a young graduate student, and some believe that Russell encouraged the relationship if he did not introduce the two with the purpose of keeping the emotional and unstable genius with him at Cambridge.
When WWI broke out, he served for Austria, at the same time as he was developing the material for the Tractatus. Learning of Pinsent’s death in the war in Italy, he became suicidal, moved in with his uncle and finished the Tractatus which he dedicated to his ‘friend’ Pinsent. He tried to get it published, but no one would take it. Remember: this book went on to be the #4 influence in the US and Canada according to the poll, the book that gave modern logic truth tables, the method that replaced Aristotle’s syllogisms.
Russell intervened back in Cambridge, and had it published and wrote and introduction for it. This was the start of the end. Though Russell saw the work as genius, he did not completely understand much of it and his introduction reflected this. Wittgenstein read the introduction and realized Russell had great misunderstandings of his work. Believing that his Tractatus had solved all the problems of philosophy, Wittgenstein left Russell and Cambridge again and went to be a school teacher in Austria. He gave away his portion of the family fortune, anonymously to writers but also to his family. Since his family was already wealthy, he wrote in a letter, “they won’t be corrupted by it”. He left the school after a short while (not a good fit, and parents thought he was crazy). He became a gardener’s assistant, and then his sister had him design her a house.
While finishing the house, he was contacted by members of the Vienna Circle, positivists using Hegel’s logic and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to give a solid foundation for science and mathematics. This was what Russell had hoped for, minus the Hegel who Russell hated. While Wittgenstein had been away, the Tractatus had become famous, and central to many already inspired by Frege and Russell. Many came to visit and discus and progressively Witt became disgusted. He began to realize that there were fundamental problems with his Tractatus and truth tables, and got into intense arguments with the Vienna Circle members, at one point turning his back on his guests and reading Tagore, an Indian transcendental poet out loud. For the rest of his life, Wittgenstein thought logical positivism (the analytic school of philosophy) misunderstood his Tractatus.
In his early period, Wittgenstein believed he had fully solved the problems of a complete system of logic. He saw it like Schopenhauer, a big early influence: logic is a perfect crystal tool of analysis, life is a messy chaotic ocean, and so logic is perfect but unfortunately never fits perfectly with life. This is like having the perfect tool for an impossible and continuous job. In conversations with positivists he started to change his thinking around and continued to write until he died. These writings were published after his death as the Philosophical Investigations and other books. In his later thought, Wittgenstein saw logic not as a perfect crystal castle in the sky but as rules and games that are imperfectly lived in the real world imperfectly and without complete definition. He no longer believed that logic could provide a foundation for mathematics, science or philosophy. He denied that contradictions are necessarily false, or disprove a mathematical-logical system.
In 1929, he decided to return to Cambridge to correct his thinking and teach. To his horror, when he arrived at the train station he was greeted by a vast crowd of intellectuals as the new hero, the author of the Tractatus, the work he now thought was exactly wrong.
The famous economist Keynes wrote to his wife: ‘Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train’. Wittgenstein continued to lecture at Cambridge, developing his ideas.
In 1934, he defected to Soviet Russia, wanting to be a plumber or work with his hands. When he was told that according to the Soviet system he would be put to work as a philosophy professor in Moscow, he defected back to Britain.
In 1937, Hitler annexed Austria. Wittgenstein had to bribe Nazis to get his Jewish family passage out and spend the equivalent today of $50 million in gold and foreign currency. Since he had given away his own portion of the family fortune, he had to get much of this from his collegues at Cambridge and other admirers of his work.
THE TRACTATUS
In his early thought, expressed in the pages of the Tractatus, reality consists of atomic facts, states of affairs that are true. Thought, expressed grammatically in language, ‘pictures’ the world with these atomic facts. The world does not perfectly fit this atomic language, but because it is the way the head makes sense of the world we cannot understand things otherwise. Wittgenstein said that it is the part of the book that is unwritten that is important, the part where life itself goes beyond this logic and makes the world what it is. Of the world beyond logic, he wrote “Of what one cannot speak, one must remain silent”, which is in fact a quote from Confucius. Our logic and the world are two things that do not fit, yet mysteriously (and mystically) the two are one.
If we boil logic with truth tables down to its tautologies, the necessary and basic workings, and leave the rest open as the world which always is beyond our thoughts, we can have the perfect system of logic and grammar that we use to understand things spelled out even if it cannot perfectly predict the world or tell us how the world works. Think of logic as a set of reading glasses, and the world as something one looks at through the glasses. Wittgenstein believed that with the Tractatus he had spelled out the perfect crystal form of the glasses, and beyond this nothing can be said for certain.
Logic consists of things that are always necessary or impossible. For instance, if one knows A is necessarily true, then one also knows that it is impossible that A is false. Notice that in his early thought Wittgenstein follows Russell and Frege in believing the principles of non-contradiction and the excluded middle, and from these alone we can build the perfect interlocking system of necessary truths that is logic.
When it comes to facts in the world, however, everything is contingent on something else and is neither simply necessary or simply impossible. Logic is the necessary and impossible book-ends with which we interpret the world and its facts, but the world is always between the necessary and the impossible, is always somewhat necessary and somewhat impossible, which creates a gulf between our pure and necessary logic and the unpredictable world. This is a very similar position to Avicenna, and quite different from Aristotle, Averroes and Russell who want some facts in the world to be necessary truths themselves. For Wittgenstein, only logic and math can be sets of necessary truths, and this is because (as Avicenna and Mill believe) they are concepts and are ideal, unlike situations of real things in the world. Once we nail down the perfect tool of logic, we can use it to examine the world and all of its messy situations. Our examinations will never be perfect because of the gap between logic and the world, but at least the logic will be necessary and perfect.
WITTGENSTEIN’S TRUTH TABLE METHOD
The genius of Wittgenstein’s truth table method is it turns mathematics on its head. Normally, mathematics starts with something given as true, and then deduces additional necessary truths. This is the deduction that Aristotle and Russell believed was the true and sure method of logic, science and mathematics. Wittgenstein, however, did not believe that there are ever necessary truths in the world, because necessity is only in the head as thought and logic.
The truth tables do not assume that the beginning proposition (in the atomic mathematical form) is true. Rather, truth tables evaluate the proposition by giving us all possible states of the statement being true and false, and then determine if anything is additionally true given these possibilities. It is assumed that any element of the proposition could be true or false, and all of the possible combinations are given and then one looks for anything being always true given each and every possibility. Truth tables do not just show us what follows if the proposition is true (how mathematics typically works), but also shows us what follows if the proposition is false, or if some of it is true and the rest false.
For Truth Tables, we assume both the principle of non-contradiction and the principle of the excluded middle. This means that there are two truth values used, True (T) and False (F). Typically, p q and r are the three variables used in symbolic logic (possibly because ‘p’ is the first letter of ‘proposition’). These variables stand for atomic facts, so ‘p’ could mean, “The dog is green” or ‘q’ could mean, “Steve is a jerk”. So, if “The dog is green”, is either true or false this means that p has the value T or F.
There are five operations or operators used in symbolic logic:
NOT, AND, OR, IF-THEN and TAUTOLOGY.
Each of these has a basic truth table we construct that shows how these operations work. These basic truth tables are then the rules or “moves” which we use to solve more complicated truth tables.
In this class, we will only be working with two variable propositions. I will provide you with an additional print out and post on the truth tables and how they operate, as well as demonstrate these in class. The truth values for each operator are:
NOT (FT) ~
AND (TFFF) ^
OR (TTTF) v
IF-THEN (TFTT) >
TAUTOLOGY (TFFT) =
Remember that OR is always used inclusively, so if p and q are both true, the whole statement is true. Remember also to watch out for IF-THEN, because it is the hardest one and trips people up a lot. In truth table logic, if a statement cannot be proved false then it is considered true, which is why the last two values are T. This could work the other way (if it is not proved true, it is considered false) but this is not the way it is done.
Once you learn how to construct the basic tables, then you can construct more complicated tables. If you construct a truth table for the following propositions, you should get the values listed to the right:
If (p and q) then (p or q) TTTT
If (p or q) then (p and q) TTFF
The reason’s Wittgenstein’s truth tables were such a success is that they proved, for the first time, that many of the axioms logicians had discovered were necessarily true (tautologies) in a way that is simple to do and easy to see. Remember Modus Tollens from Kanada? Wittgenstein’s truth tables can demonstrate why it is always true!
Once you learn how to construct the more complicated truth tables, you should be able to prove each of the tautologies below by getting TTTT (true in all four cases) underneath the equals sign.
Transposition (Modus Tollens): (p > q) = (~ q > ~ p)
Implication: (p > q) = (~ p v q)
Disjunction: (p v q) = (~ p > q)
De Morgan’s A: ~ (p ^ q) = (~ p v ~ q)
De Morgan’s B: ~ (p v q) = (~ p ^ ~ q)
In an end of the century poll in 2000, philosophy professors from America and Canada were asked to list the five most important books that influenced their own work. When all of the results were tallied up, the Philosophical Investigations was #1, and the Tractatus was #4. The Philosophical Investigations was cited far more frequently than any other book, was listed first on far more ballots, and crossed over more into many different disciplines and areas of study.
Wittgenstein’s thought can be divided into his early, middle and later work. His early work is the book the Tractatus, the book which gave the world truth table logic. This tool, as Wittgenstein later came to see it, remains the mathematical system taught as logic today. Just as Wittgenstein became famous for his truth tables, he switched positions in his thinking and came to reject his earlier work. He wrote in notebooks that were only published after his death, and the Philosophical Investigations is the most celebrated of these.
First, we will look at the life of Wittgenstein. Second, we will consider some of the important ideas in the Tractatus and Wittgenstein’s early thought. Third, we will begin learning the truth table method of logic Wittgenstein introduced in the Tractatus.
The Life and Thought of Wittgenstein:
Wittgenstein’s Father was the Austrian Carnegie, making a fortune in Steel. Though his father was Protestant, and his mother Jewish, Ludwig was baptized Catholic because of antisemitism at the time. In his early years, Ludwig was a proud atheist but by the time he was working on his Tractatus he had a mystical transcendental outlook which he kept for the rest of his life. Though never religious, and though he had to bribe Nazis later to smuggle his “Jewish” family from Austria, he was buried as a Catholic.
The Wittgenstein family was known for intense criticism, musical talent, depression, and suicide. Three of Wittgenstein’s four brothers committed suicide, and he himself considered suicide for awhile before launching into his late period. Unfortunately, suicide was considered romantic for Austrian elites at the time.
Wittgenstein was in Hitler’s elementary school, 2 days younger, but because he was put forward a grade and Hitler was held back a grade he was 2 years ahead. Both he and Hitler hated the school and the lessons.
He began studying at university in Berlin to become an engineer with an interest in flight (the Wright Brothers had recently invented the motorized glider, but flew it in France and Germany until 1907 as the US Army did not believe them). After failing in his attempt to build a better propeller, he began studying mathematical theory and philosophy of mathematics, becoming entranced with two thinkers who are along with Wittgenstein foundational for Analytical philosophy and logic: Russell from Britain, and Frege from Germany. Wittgenstein went to see Frege, who did not fully understand his questions and advised him to go see Russell, which he did in 1911.
He showed up unannounced to Russell’s room at Trinity College, impressed him with his intense and brilliant arguments. Russell became convinced that the young Austrian was going to carry his work forward and be his successor, solving the remaining problems of logic that Russell’s work on the foundations of mathematics had left open. As mentioned last lecture, Russell had shown there were contradictions unresolved in Frege’s work with set theory, but Russell had become frustrated trying to solve these contradiction with his theory of types.
Wittgenstein, an eccentric and difficult personality, was never fully comfortable at Cambridge, and often got into disagreements with Russell and threatened to leave many times before fleeing to Norway where he believed he could finish his work on Logic. While some still disagree, it is generally accepted that Wittgenstein was gay, developed a relationship with Pinsent, a young graduate student, and some believe that Russell encouraged the relationship if he did not introduce the two with the purpose of keeping the emotional and unstable genius with him at Cambridge.
When WWI broke out, he served for Austria, at the same time as he was developing the material for the Tractatus. Learning of Pinsent’s death in the war in Italy, he became suicidal, moved in with his uncle and finished the Tractatus which he dedicated to his ‘friend’ Pinsent. He tried to get it published, but no one would take it. Remember: this book went on to be the #4 influence in the US and Canada according to the poll, the book that gave modern logic truth tables, the method that replaced Aristotle’s syllogisms.
Russell intervened back in Cambridge, and had it published and wrote and introduction for it. This was the start of the end. Though Russell saw the work as genius, he did not completely understand much of it and his introduction reflected this. Wittgenstein read the introduction and realized Russell had great misunderstandings of his work. Believing that his Tractatus had solved all the problems of philosophy, Wittgenstein left Russell and Cambridge again and went to be a school teacher in Austria. He gave away his portion of the family fortune, anonymously to writers but also to his family. Since his family was already wealthy, he wrote in a letter, “they won’t be corrupted by it”. He left the school after a short while (not a good fit, and parents thought he was crazy). He became a gardener’s assistant, and then his sister had him design her a house.
While finishing the house, he was contacted by members of the Vienna Circle, positivists using Hegel’s logic and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to give a solid foundation for science and mathematics. This was what Russell had hoped for, minus the Hegel who Russell hated. While Wittgenstein had been away, the Tractatus had become famous, and central to many already inspired by Frege and Russell. Many came to visit and discus and progressively Witt became disgusted. He began to realize that there were fundamental problems with his Tractatus and truth tables, and got into intense arguments with the Vienna Circle members, at one point turning his back on his guests and reading Tagore, an Indian transcendental poet out loud. For the rest of his life, Wittgenstein thought logical positivism (the analytic school of philosophy) misunderstood his Tractatus.
In his early period, Wittgenstein believed he had fully solved the problems of a complete system of logic. He saw it like Schopenhauer, a big early influence: logic is a perfect crystal tool of analysis, life is a messy chaotic ocean, and so logic is perfect but unfortunately never fits perfectly with life. This is like having the perfect tool for an impossible and continuous job. In conversations with positivists he started to change his thinking around and continued to write until he died. These writings were published after his death as the Philosophical Investigations and other books. In his later thought, Wittgenstein saw logic not as a perfect crystal castle in the sky but as rules and games that are imperfectly lived in the real world imperfectly and without complete definition. He no longer believed that logic could provide a foundation for mathematics, science or philosophy. He denied that contradictions are necessarily false, or disprove a mathematical-logical system.
In 1929, he decided to return to Cambridge to correct his thinking and teach. To his horror, when he arrived at the train station he was greeted by a vast crowd of intellectuals as the new hero, the author of the Tractatus, the work he now thought was exactly wrong.
The famous economist Keynes wrote to his wife: ‘Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train’. Wittgenstein continued to lecture at Cambridge, developing his ideas.
In 1934, he defected to Soviet Russia, wanting to be a plumber or work with his hands. When he was told that according to the Soviet system he would be put to work as a philosophy professor in Moscow, he defected back to Britain.
In 1937, Hitler annexed Austria. Wittgenstein had to bribe Nazis to get his Jewish family passage out and spend the equivalent today of $50 million in gold and foreign currency. Since he had given away his own portion of the family fortune, he had to get much of this from his collegues at Cambridge and other admirers of his work.
THE TRACTATUS
In his early thought, expressed in the pages of the Tractatus, reality consists of atomic facts, states of affairs that are true. Thought, expressed grammatically in language, ‘pictures’ the world with these atomic facts. The world does not perfectly fit this atomic language, but because it is the way the head makes sense of the world we cannot understand things otherwise. Wittgenstein said that it is the part of the book that is unwritten that is important, the part where life itself goes beyond this logic and makes the world what it is. Of the world beyond logic, he wrote “Of what one cannot speak, one must remain silent”, which is in fact a quote from Confucius. Our logic and the world are two things that do not fit, yet mysteriously (and mystically) the two are one.
If we boil logic with truth tables down to its tautologies, the necessary and basic workings, and leave the rest open as the world which always is beyond our thoughts, we can have the perfect system of logic and grammar that we use to understand things spelled out even if it cannot perfectly predict the world or tell us how the world works. Think of logic as a set of reading glasses, and the world as something one looks at through the glasses. Wittgenstein believed that with the Tractatus he had spelled out the perfect crystal form of the glasses, and beyond this nothing can be said for certain.
Logic consists of things that are always necessary or impossible. For instance, if one knows A is necessarily true, then one also knows that it is impossible that A is false. Notice that in his early thought Wittgenstein follows Russell and Frege in believing the principles of non-contradiction and the excluded middle, and from these alone we can build the perfect interlocking system of necessary truths that is logic.
When it comes to facts in the world, however, everything is contingent on something else and is neither simply necessary or simply impossible. Logic is the necessary and impossible book-ends with which we interpret the world and its facts, but the world is always between the necessary and the impossible, is always somewhat necessary and somewhat impossible, which creates a gulf between our pure and necessary logic and the unpredictable world. This is a very similar position to Avicenna, and quite different from Aristotle, Averroes and Russell who want some facts in the world to be necessary truths themselves. For Wittgenstein, only logic and math can be sets of necessary truths, and this is because (as Avicenna and Mill believe) they are concepts and are ideal, unlike situations of real things in the world. Once we nail down the perfect tool of logic, we can use it to examine the world and all of its messy situations. Our examinations will never be perfect because of the gap between logic and the world, but at least the logic will be necessary and perfect.
WITTGENSTEIN’S TRUTH TABLE METHOD
The genius of Wittgenstein’s truth table method is it turns mathematics on its head. Normally, mathematics starts with something given as true, and then deduces additional necessary truths. This is the deduction that Aristotle and Russell believed was the true and sure method of logic, science and mathematics. Wittgenstein, however, did not believe that there are ever necessary truths in the world, because necessity is only in the head as thought and logic.
The truth tables do not assume that the beginning proposition (in the atomic mathematical form) is true. Rather, truth tables evaluate the proposition by giving us all possible states of the statement being true and false, and then determine if anything is additionally true given these possibilities. It is assumed that any element of the proposition could be true or false, and all of the possible combinations are given and then one looks for anything being always true given each and every possibility. Truth tables do not just show us what follows if the proposition is true (how mathematics typically works), but also shows us what follows if the proposition is false, or if some of it is true and the rest false.
For Truth Tables, we assume both the principle of non-contradiction and the principle of the excluded middle. This means that there are two truth values used, True (T) and False (F). Typically, p q and r are the three variables used in symbolic logic (possibly because ‘p’ is the first letter of ‘proposition’). These variables stand for atomic facts, so ‘p’ could mean, “The dog is green” or ‘q’ could mean, “Steve is a jerk”. So, if “The dog is green”, is either true or false this means that p has the value T or F.
There are five operations or operators used in symbolic logic:
NOT, AND, OR, IF-THEN and TAUTOLOGY.
Each of these has a basic truth table we construct that shows how these operations work. These basic truth tables are then the rules or “moves” which we use to solve more complicated truth tables.
In this class, we will only be working with two variable propositions. I will provide you with an additional print out and post on the truth tables and how they operate, as well as demonstrate these in class. The truth values for each operator are:
NOT (FT) ~
AND (TFFF) ^
OR (TTTF) v
IF-THEN (TFTT) >
TAUTOLOGY (TFFT) =
Remember that OR is always used inclusively, so if p and q are both true, the whole statement is true. Remember also to watch out for IF-THEN, because it is the hardest one and trips people up a lot. In truth table logic, if a statement cannot be proved false then it is considered true, which is why the last two values are T. This could work the other way (if it is not proved true, it is considered false) but this is not the way it is done.
Once you learn how to construct the basic tables, then you can construct more complicated tables. If you construct a truth table for the following propositions, you should get the values listed to the right:
If (p and q) then (p or q) TTTT
If (p or q) then (p and q) TTFF
The reason’s Wittgenstein’s truth tables were such a success is that they proved, for the first time, that many of the axioms logicians had discovered were necessarily true (tautologies) in a way that is simple to do and easy to see. Remember Modus Tollens from Kanada? Wittgenstein’s truth tables can demonstrate why it is always true!
Once you learn how to construct the more complicated truth tables, you should be able to prove each of the tautologies below by getting TTTT (true in all four cases) underneath the equals sign.
Transposition (Modus Tollens): (p > q) = (~ q > ~ p)
Implication: (p > q) = (~ p v q)
Disjunction: (p v q) = (~ p > q)
De Morgan’s A: ~ (p ^ q) = (~ p v ~ q)
De Morgan’s B: ~ (p v q) = (~ p ^ ~ q)
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Ethics: Violence & Lt. Grossman
Apes & Violence
Monkeys and apes are some of the only creatures that can rotate their shoulders as we can. This means that they, like us, are the only creatures that can throw things and club things.
There are three major groups of apes, Gorillas, Orangutans and Chimpanzees. Gorillas kill kids, but they don’t rape. Orangutans never kill kids, but they rape all the time. Our direct ancestor is the Chimpanzee, which comes in two major sub-species. Bonobo Chimps, the smaller group, are quite non-violent and solve all social issues with sex. The main group of Chimps, our direct relatives, do all the kinds of violence known to human kind. Once again, like every ethical issue we examine, the issue is older than humanity.
Early Civilization & Violence
Violence, like sex, was a part of life since childhood in the beginning. As Grossman says, in Victorian England sex became something shameful and best kept out of sight, and similarly with the butcher and refrigeration violence became something out of sight. Consider David Foster Wallace’s FX Porn article about T2 and Jurassic park. Sex and killing are specialized spectacles, quite unrealistic and pieced together with bad dialogue. Interestingly, serial killers and aggressive personality types often start and practice by killing animals, which used to be something everyone had to do. These are disassociating fantasies.
In the ancient world cosmology picture of the world, sacrifice and dismemberment play a major part in the creation of the world. To eat, one must kill livestock. Similarly, sacrifice was seen as giving food/thanks back in balance and exchange. The cosmos was thought of as a great sacrifice in which the All is carved up for everyone’s use and consumption. Thus, one should carve up animals and humans and give them back to be fair.
Consider the scepter of the king. Often in early cultural art we see the king holding a stick that symbolizes his authority. It has been suggested that this is the king as judge, jury and executioner. If you do something stupid, you get hit with the stick. How hard you get hit depends on what you did. The Egyptian Pharaohs have crossing stick and hook, ‘rod and staff’ from the psalm, in crossed arms, signifying that the king has power over life and death, which cross over into one another (like any pair of opposites).
Society became complexified and highly specialized. We now have specialized individuals who kill animals, who cook meat, who order acts of aggression, and who carry out the orders. As Grossman says, this specialization has made violence unnatural and fantastic, like sex.
Consider now that the US spends more on War than anyone has ever in all of world history. Objective ‘science’ is a myth in so far as the US Military has been one of the biggest supporters and funders of science (physics, mathematics, psychology) so far. Addicted To War says: over 50% of budget and taxes go to US Military.
LT. COL. GROSSMAN’S ON KILLING
The book is written in 1995, and Grossman says that there has never been a book on killing or dealing with killing from the individual perspective until this time. As an officer and psychologist of the US Marine Corps, Grossman tells us many things that are surprising but trustworthy about the capability of individuals and groups to be violent.
The overall message of the book I find to be quite positive. We all have violent thoughts, but very few humans will be violent, no matter what culture or ethnicity or gender. Normally, there is a safety catch in the human mind that prevents us from being violent (notice the gun metaphor, useful for teaching troops). However, in certain situations with particular factors, most everyone becomes capable of violence. 2% of the population have an aggressive personality, potentially psychosis (these individuals are often, Grossman says, drafted into the hardcore units, the marine spearhead squads dropped behind enemy lines or the frontal advance groups). Regardless of whether one is of the 98% or the aggressive 2%, violence is a kick at first but then psychological problems set in that are difficult for the individual.
The overall message is: though human beings are constantly getting themselves into violent situations, there are no human beings who find violence easy or simply justifiable. They pose this way to seem tough, but as Grossman says violence is about impressing the enemy and making them submit much more than it is about the killing. The killing is always in the service of something else, such as staying alive. Grossman, as a psychologist, is convinced that post traumatic stress disorder is natural and most will carry it silently their whole lives, afraid of what others will say or say about them if they question the things they did for the highest ideals.
In my terms: there is a balance that is quite brutal in the head. We can pretend like others don’t matter to us, but only for awhile. Grossman says: the one who takes life cheapens his own, in his own head, and argues this point well.
Non-firing Rates:
Grossman starts off from a very military pragmatic point of view. He argues that we have every reason to believe that most humans who have been involved with war have not tried to kill anyone the whole time. He notes studies that say that WWI and II troops would routinely fire over the heads of the enemy. He says that he and others examined these studies and the military celebrated a 95% firing rate in Vietnam, although he later tells us the factors that make this seem much better for the military than it really was. There were 50,000 rounds per US kill in Vietnam.
Grossman argues that, in all cultures and times, the majority of soldiers were posturing in war, doing everything to make the enemy back down, cease fighting and submit. Before guerilla war became the norm, this is the beating of the drums and the war chants, the clashing of shields. Grossman says we see nonlethal fighting with one’s own species in piranhas, rattlers, and the whole animal kingdom. Alexander the great only lost 700 men the whole 20 years of war.
This is quite similar to Hegel’s idea of the master/slave, reversed: submittal is primary.
American media is quite gifted with the myth of the easy kill, for both the hero and villain. Ex: Schwarzenegger’s Commando (“I let him go”) and O Dog from Menace to Society watching tape. This myth, like the propaganda last week, is a cultural conspiracy, a conspiracy of silence according to Grossman. It’s not what it says that’s the lie, but what remains unsaid.
What this myth conceals: there are far greater chance of being a psychological casualty of conflict then there are of being killed or wounded. 60 days of continuous combat without rest means 98% rate of psychological casualties (why we keep ‘green zones’ and distance to target).
But: is this killing or being subjected to combat? Grossman argues that Britain and Germany bombed each other’s cities in WWII, the first massive bombardments of history (now our specialty, setting the bar in Vietnam, then Gulf War, now War in Iraq). The theory was that the civilian population would go into traumatic shell shock, that everyone would be quickly converted to psychological casualties, but this turned out surprisingly to not be the case.
It turns out that, unless one feels that one has done something to warrant being killed, one bunkers down and does not suffer post traumatic stress disorder. Depression sets in, but not PTSD. Prison guards in the cities DO suffer from PTSD during bombings, but NOT the POWS! This shows us the balance of self and other in the head. One compulsively sets the world up as THIS perspective vs. OTHERS, and one sets the others up as one sets up the self in the head. This means that when one knows that the other will feel JUSTIFIED in killing, one becomes conflicted with oneself. Consider that recon patrols behind enemy lines don’t suffer PTSD like hard core (2%) marine spearhead units that are dropped behind lines to sew death and confusion. If one is in the enemies home turf, but not killing, one does not feel like the justifiably killable target that one does if one is killing the enemy. Consider that killing someone in their home is much more traumatic and justifiable than killing someone in their home.
So: What factors increase or decrease the justification and the enabling of violence?
This is what Grossman and the US Military have been studying intensely. Grossman tells us many surprising things openly that are done to help US troops kill easier with less consequence.
Absolution by Distance:
Killing with a knife is much harder than killing with a 20 foot pike, and killing with an automatic weapon is far easier because one does not feel the other’s body at all (propaganda value of showing the enemy with fixed bayonets). Medium to long range is the easiest kill. The farther away, the less PTSD. The more equipment mediating the kill, the easier it is. Bomber pilots feel little to no PTSD. Grossman says ‘Nintendo Warfare’ in first Gulf War is intentional use of night vision goggles and TV screens in tanks, which lessens the PTSD (one would think the purpose was to take the enemy in the dark, but not so).
The less one sees eyes and faces, the easier it is to kill. This is why the executioner is hooded along with the executed. Both lessen the feeling of PTSD for the executioner. Apes and humans have an impulse to attack when the other turns and runs. This is why if one is caught or kidnapped, one always looks the captor in the eyes as much as possible, take off the helmet or hat (or hood), why military are taught to kill with a kidney strike from behind.
Intolerance and Racism are used actively as distancing mechanisms, making it easier to kill. The less one’s enemy is like oneself, the easier it is to justify killing. This is why it is fundamental to say the other ‘does not share one’s values’. This is THE WEST, earlier the EUROPEAN RACE.
Absolution by Authority:
Officers are separated from killing. The officer orders the aggression, the troops carry it out. The officer can feel distanced from the act because they themselves did not kill or see the kill, and the troops can feel distance because they did not decide to kill or order the kill.
Interestingly, the farther the authority is away from the troops, the less the authority is effective, BUT the farther away the authority the easier it is to do the ordering.
Group Absolution:
The more one is firing into the brush with many others, the more one is unsure that one is killing a particular target oneself. In firing squads, often only one person has a bullet, and the others have blanks and are told this to ease the actions. In defending the home (being amongst one’s group and the group turf) one feels justified in killing in a way that is reversed when one is on enemy soil, as mentioned.
Stages of Killing
1) Combat High, exhilaration, esp. medium to long range (automatic weapons are best).
2) Remorse (move from positive to swing negative)
3) Rationalization (wrestling with the contradiction of positive/negative, self/other)
Both soldiers and gang members find themselves having nightmares where those who have been killed come back to haunt them and ask why. It is as if killing a being does not kill the presence, that the negated presence comes back. This is likely why people believed in evil ghosts for so long across all cultures. One feels one is still indebted to beings long gone if one was involved in their disappearance. (ex: ghost of Jacob Marley, the telltale heart of Poe)
Grossman notes that for HR Bush, Gulf War surge in popularity and then fall in end show social process of these stages as well as individual (and now this fits W Bush in Iraq war as well).
Monkeys and apes are some of the only creatures that can rotate their shoulders as we can. This means that they, like us, are the only creatures that can throw things and club things.
There are three major groups of apes, Gorillas, Orangutans and Chimpanzees. Gorillas kill kids, but they don’t rape. Orangutans never kill kids, but they rape all the time. Our direct ancestor is the Chimpanzee, which comes in two major sub-species. Bonobo Chimps, the smaller group, are quite non-violent and solve all social issues with sex. The main group of Chimps, our direct relatives, do all the kinds of violence known to human kind. Once again, like every ethical issue we examine, the issue is older than humanity.
Early Civilization & Violence
Violence, like sex, was a part of life since childhood in the beginning. As Grossman says, in Victorian England sex became something shameful and best kept out of sight, and similarly with the butcher and refrigeration violence became something out of sight. Consider David Foster Wallace’s FX Porn article about T2 and Jurassic park. Sex and killing are specialized spectacles, quite unrealistic and pieced together with bad dialogue. Interestingly, serial killers and aggressive personality types often start and practice by killing animals, which used to be something everyone had to do. These are disassociating fantasies.
In the ancient world cosmology picture of the world, sacrifice and dismemberment play a major part in the creation of the world. To eat, one must kill livestock. Similarly, sacrifice was seen as giving food/thanks back in balance and exchange. The cosmos was thought of as a great sacrifice in which the All is carved up for everyone’s use and consumption. Thus, one should carve up animals and humans and give them back to be fair.
Consider the scepter of the king. Often in early cultural art we see the king holding a stick that symbolizes his authority. It has been suggested that this is the king as judge, jury and executioner. If you do something stupid, you get hit with the stick. How hard you get hit depends on what you did. The Egyptian Pharaohs have crossing stick and hook, ‘rod and staff’ from the psalm, in crossed arms, signifying that the king has power over life and death, which cross over into one another (like any pair of opposites).
Society became complexified and highly specialized. We now have specialized individuals who kill animals, who cook meat, who order acts of aggression, and who carry out the orders. As Grossman says, this specialization has made violence unnatural and fantastic, like sex.
Consider now that the US spends more on War than anyone has ever in all of world history. Objective ‘science’ is a myth in so far as the US Military has been one of the biggest supporters and funders of science (physics, mathematics, psychology) so far. Addicted To War says: over 50% of budget and taxes go to US Military.
LT. COL. GROSSMAN’S ON KILLING
The book is written in 1995, and Grossman says that there has never been a book on killing or dealing with killing from the individual perspective until this time. As an officer and psychologist of the US Marine Corps, Grossman tells us many things that are surprising but trustworthy about the capability of individuals and groups to be violent.
The overall message of the book I find to be quite positive. We all have violent thoughts, but very few humans will be violent, no matter what culture or ethnicity or gender. Normally, there is a safety catch in the human mind that prevents us from being violent (notice the gun metaphor, useful for teaching troops). However, in certain situations with particular factors, most everyone becomes capable of violence. 2% of the population have an aggressive personality, potentially psychosis (these individuals are often, Grossman says, drafted into the hardcore units, the marine spearhead squads dropped behind enemy lines or the frontal advance groups). Regardless of whether one is of the 98% or the aggressive 2%, violence is a kick at first but then psychological problems set in that are difficult for the individual.
The overall message is: though human beings are constantly getting themselves into violent situations, there are no human beings who find violence easy or simply justifiable. They pose this way to seem tough, but as Grossman says violence is about impressing the enemy and making them submit much more than it is about the killing. The killing is always in the service of something else, such as staying alive. Grossman, as a psychologist, is convinced that post traumatic stress disorder is natural and most will carry it silently their whole lives, afraid of what others will say or say about them if they question the things they did for the highest ideals.
In my terms: there is a balance that is quite brutal in the head. We can pretend like others don’t matter to us, but only for awhile. Grossman says: the one who takes life cheapens his own, in his own head, and argues this point well.
Non-firing Rates:
Grossman starts off from a very military pragmatic point of view. He argues that we have every reason to believe that most humans who have been involved with war have not tried to kill anyone the whole time. He notes studies that say that WWI and II troops would routinely fire over the heads of the enemy. He says that he and others examined these studies and the military celebrated a 95% firing rate in Vietnam, although he later tells us the factors that make this seem much better for the military than it really was. There were 50,000 rounds per US kill in Vietnam.
Grossman argues that, in all cultures and times, the majority of soldiers were posturing in war, doing everything to make the enemy back down, cease fighting and submit. Before guerilla war became the norm, this is the beating of the drums and the war chants, the clashing of shields. Grossman says we see nonlethal fighting with one’s own species in piranhas, rattlers, and the whole animal kingdom. Alexander the great only lost 700 men the whole 20 years of war.
This is quite similar to Hegel’s idea of the master/slave, reversed: submittal is primary.
American media is quite gifted with the myth of the easy kill, for both the hero and villain. Ex: Schwarzenegger’s Commando (“I let him go”) and O Dog from Menace to Society watching tape. This myth, like the propaganda last week, is a cultural conspiracy, a conspiracy of silence according to Grossman. It’s not what it says that’s the lie, but what remains unsaid.
What this myth conceals: there are far greater chance of being a psychological casualty of conflict then there are of being killed or wounded. 60 days of continuous combat without rest means 98% rate of psychological casualties (why we keep ‘green zones’ and distance to target).
But: is this killing or being subjected to combat? Grossman argues that Britain and Germany bombed each other’s cities in WWII, the first massive bombardments of history (now our specialty, setting the bar in Vietnam, then Gulf War, now War in Iraq). The theory was that the civilian population would go into traumatic shell shock, that everyone would be quickly converted to psychological casualties, but this turned out surprisingly to not be the case.
It turns out that, unless one feels that one has done something to warrant being killed, one bunkers down and does not suffer post traumatic stress disorder. Depression sets in, but not PTSD. Prison guards in the cities DO suffer from PTSD during bombings, but NOT the POWS! This shows us the balance of self and other in the head. One compulsively sets the world up as THIS perspective vs. OTHERS, and one sets the others up as one sets up the self in the head. This means that when one knows that the other will feel JUSTIFIED in killing, one becomes conflicted with oneself. Consider that recon patrols behind enemy lines don’t suffer PTSD like hard core (2%) marine spearhead units that are dropped behind lines to sew death and confusion. If one is in the enemies home turf, but not killing, one does not feel like the justifiably killable target that one does if one is killing the enemy. Consider that killing someone in their home is much more traumatic and justifiable than killing someone in their home.
So: What factors increase or decrease the justification and the enabling of violence?
This is what Grossman and the US Military have been studying intensely. Grossman tells us many surprising things openly that are done to help US troops kill easier with less consequence.
Absolution by Distance:
Killing with a knife is much harder than killing with a 20 foot pike, and killing with an automatic weapon is far easier because one does not feel the other’s body at all (propaganda value of showing the enemy with fixed bayonets). Medium to long range is the easiest kill. The farther away, the less PTSD. The more equipment mediating the kill, the easier it is. Bomber pilots feel little to no PTSD. Grossman says ‘Nintendo Warfare’ in first Gulf War is intentional use of night vision goggles and TV screens in tanks, which lessens the PTSD (one would think the purpose was to take the enemy in the dark, but not so).
The less one sees eyes and faces, the easier it is to kill. This is why the executioner is hooded along with the executed. Both lessen the feeling of PTSD for the executioner. Apes and humans have an impulse to attack when the other turns and runs. This is why if one is caught or kidnapped, one always looks the captor in the eyes as much as possible, take off the helmet or hat (or hood), why military are taught to kill with a kidney strike from behind.
Intolerance and Racism are used actively as distancing mechanisms, making it easier to kill. The less one’s enemy is like oneself, the easier it is to justify killing. This is why it is fundamental to say the other ‘does not share one’s values’. This is THE WEST, earlier the EUROPEAN RACE.
Absolution by Authority:
Officers are separated from killing. The officer orders the aggression, the troops carry it out. The officer can feel distanced from the act because they themselves did not kill or see the kill, and the troops can feel distance because they did not decide to kill or order the kill.
Interestingly, the farther the authority is away from the troops, the less the authority is effective, BUT the farther away the authority the easier it is to do the ordering.
Group Absolution:
The more one is firing into the brush with many others, the more one is unsure that one is killing a particular target oneself. In firing squads, often only one person has a bullet, and the others have blanks and are told this to ease the actions. In defending the home (being amongst one’s group and the group turf) one feels justified in killing in a way that is reversed when one is on enemy soil, as mentioned.
Stages of Killing
1) Combat High, exhilaration, esp. medium to long range (automatic weapons are best).
2) Remorse (move from positive to swing negative)
3) Rationalization (wrestling with the contradiction of positive/negative, self/other)
Both soldiers and gang members find themselves having nightmares where those who have been killed come back to haunt them and ask why. It is as if killing a being does not kill the presence, that the negated presence comes back. This is likely why people believed in evil ghosts for so long across all cultures. One feels one is still indebted to beings long gone if one was involved in their disappearance. (ex: ghost of Jacob Marley, the telltale heart of Poe)
Grossman notes that for HR Bush, Gulf War surge in popularity and then fall in end show social process of these stages as well as individual (and now this fits W Bush in Iraq war as well).
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Logic: Guide to Truth Tables
NOTE: THE TRUTH VALUES (Ts and Fs) BELOW DO NOT LINE UP RIGHT NO MATTER WHAT I DO. GAHHH!
There are three types of truth tables that you need to know for this Logic class. First, there are the basic truth tables (NOT, AND, OR, IF-THEN). These are the tables you have to understand to do the other two types of truth tables because each step of solving a truth table uses a particular case of these basic truth tables as a rule.
NOT
p ~ p
T F
F T
NOT is the most basic truth table with one variable (p)
and two cases (p is true, and p is false).
Notice that NOT takes a T and makes it an F or takes an F and makes it a T.
NOT does this to variables like ~ p {NOT P} and propositions like ~(p v q) {NOT (P OR Q)}.
All the other truth tables we will do involve two variables (p, q) and four cases.
The truth tables for AND, OR and IF-THEN:
AND
pq p ^ q
TT T
TF F
FT F
FF F
OR
pq p v q
TT T
TF T
FT T
FF F
IF>THEN
pq p > q
TT T
TF F
FT T
FF T
Notice that the four cases are always the same four cases in the same order, that AND is only true when p and q are both true (case 1), that OR is only false when p and q are both false (case 4), and that IF>THEN is only false when p is true and q is false (case 2).
IF>THEN is the tricky one. We all know that “p and q” is only true when both are true. If I tell you “I have an apple and I have a pear”, the whole proposition is true only if it is true that I have an apple and it is true that I have a pear. It is also fairly obvious that if I tell you “I have an apple or I have a pear”, the whole proposition is false only if I have neither an apple nor a pear. It is not so obvious why IF>THEN is TRUE in case 3 and case 4.
Many people make the mistake of thinking that case 3 and 4 are false because p is false. In fact, whenever p is false (p > q) is always true no matter whether q is true or false. Think about it as if it is a promise and the promise remains true unless it is broken. If I promise you, “If I bring you an apple, I will bring you a pear”, the only way I can break my promise is if I bring you an apple but I do not bring you a pear (case 2). If I do not bring you an apple, I have not broken my promise to you whether or not I bring you a pear. If I do not bring you an apple and I bring a pear or I do not bring you either an apple or a pear it cannot be breaking the promise because I said “IF I bring you an apple…”.
The second type of truth table uses the basic truth tables and their cases as rules to evaluate a proposition that contains p and q to see when it is true and when it is false.
Let us take the proposition ~ (p v q). We have to do two steps because there are two operators, NOT and OR. Just like algebra, we must do the order of operations correctly. First we do the inner OR, and then we do the outer NOT.
pq ~ (p v q)
TT F T
TF F T
FT F T
FF T F
Notice that the final answer or evaluation is in bold (FFFT). First you figure out the OR on the inside using the basic OR table, then you take those four values and invert them with the NOT as the second and final step.
pq (~ p v q)
TT F T T
TF F F F
FT T T T
FF T T F
Let us now look at the proposition (~p v q). Notice the NOT is now inside the brackets, and that the values for q stay the same while the values for p are changed by the NOT. Once you have written the values for each case under NOT p and q, you can then use the OR rule (the four cases of the basic OR table) to figure out the four truth values that go under the OR as the final answer.
Case one is now (F v T), which is case 3 of the basic OR table, so the value for case 1 is true because OR is always true whenever either side of the OR is true. Notice that only case 2 is false because in case 2 ~ p and q are both false. Notice also that (~ p v q) has the same four truth values as (p > q), and so the two propositions are said to be equivalent.
The third type of truth table is a proof that two expressions are equivalent (have the same four truth values in the same order). We use an equals sign (=) between two propositions, and if the truth values for one proposition are the same as the other, we can put four T’s down the middle.
Let us evaluate the equivalence of the propositions ~ (p ^ q) and (~ p v ~ q), the equivalence known as De Morgan’s Theorem A. When we evaluate the equivalence, it goes like this:
pq ~(p ^ q) = (~ p v ~ q)
TT F T T F F F
TF T F T F T T
FT T F T T T F
FF T F T T T T
Notice that the values underneath the NOT on the left side and the OR on the right side are equivalent, and so there are four T’s underneath the equals sign as the final answer. This means that by the truth table method we have proved De Morgan’s Theorem A! This is why Wittgenstein’s truth tables replaced Aristotle’s syllogisms as the central tool of modern Logic.
There are three types of truth tables that you need to know for this Logic class. First, there are the basic truth tables (NOT, AND, OR, IF-THEN). These are the tables you have to understand to do the other two types of truth tables because each step of solving a truth table uses a particular case of these basic truth tables as a rule.
NOT
p ~ p
T F
F T
NOT is the most basic truth table with one variable (p)
and two cases (p is true, and p is false).
Notice that NOT takes a T and makes it an F or takes an F and makes it a T.
NOT does this to variables like ~ p {NOT P} and propositions like ~(p v q) {NOT (P OR Q)}.
All the other truth tables we will do involve two variables (p, q) and four cases.
The truth tables for AND, OR and IF-THEN:
AND
pq p ^ q
TT T
TF F
FT F
FF F
OR
pq p v q
TT T
TF T
FT T
FF F
IF>THEN
pq p > q
TT T
TF F
FT T
FF T
Notice that the four cases are always the same four cases in the same order, that AND is only true when p and q are both true (case 1), that OR is only false when p and q are both false (case 4), and that IF>THEN is only false when p is true and q is false (case 2).
IF>THEN is the tricky one. We all know that “p and q” is only true when both are true. If I tell you “I have an apple and I have a pear”, the whole proposition is true only if it is true that I have an apple and it is true that I have a pear. It is also fairly obvious that if I tell you “I have an apple or I have a pear”, the whole proposition is false only if I have neither an apple nor a pear. It is not so obvious why IF>THEN is TRUE in case 3 and case 4.
Many people make the mistake of thinking that case 3 and 4 are false because p is false. In fact, whenever p is false (p > q) is always true no matter whether q is true or false. Think about it as if it is a promise and the promise remains true unless it is broken. If I promise you, “If I bring you an apple, I will bring you a pear”, the only way I can break my promise is if I bring you an apple but I do not bring you a pear (case 2). If I do not bring you an apple, I have not broken my promise to you whether or not I bring you a pear. If I do not bring you an apple and I bring a pear or I do not bring you either an apple or a pear it cannot be breaking the promise because I said “IF I bring you an apple…”.
The second type of truth table uses the basic truth tables and their cases as rules to evaluate a proposition that contains p and q to see when it is true and when it is false.
Let us take the proposition ~ (p v q). We have to do two steps because there are two operators, NOT and OR. Just like algebra, we must do the order of operations correctly. First we do the inner OR, and then we do the outer NOT.
pq ~ (p v q)
TT F T
TF F T
FT F T
FF T F
Notice that the final answer or evaluation is in bold (FFFT). First you figure out the OR on the inside using the basic OR table, then you take those four values and invert them with the NOT as the second and final step.
pq (~ p v q)
TT F T T
TF F F F
FT T T T
FF T T F
Let us now look at the proposition (~p v q). Notice the NOT is now inside the brackets, and that the values for q stay the same while the values for p are changed by the NOT. Once you have written the values for each case under NOT p and q, you can then use the OR rule (the four cases of the basic OR table) to figure out the four truth values that go under the OR as the final answer.
Case one is now (F v T), which is case 3 of the basic OR table, so the value for case 1 is true because OR is always true whenever either side of the OR is true. Notice that only case 2 is false because in case 2 ~ p and q are both false. Notice also that (~ p v q) has the same four truth values as (p > q), and so the two propositions are said to be equivalent.
The third type of truth table is a proof that two expressions are equivalent (have the same four truth values in the same order). We use an equals sign (=) between two propositions, and if the truth values for one proposition are the same as the other, we can put four T’s down the middle.
Let us evaluate the equivalence of the propositions ~ (p ^ q) and (~ p v ~ q), the equivalence known as De Morgan’s Theorem A. When we evaluate the equivalence, it goes like this:
pq ~(p ^ q) = (~ p v ~ q)
TT F T T F F F
TF T F T F T T
FT T F T T T F
FF T F T T T T
Notice that the values underneath the NOT on the left side and the OR on the right side are equivalent, and so there are four T’s underneath the equals sign as the final answer. This means that by the truth table method we have proved De Morgan’s Theorem A! This is why Wittgenstein’s truth tables replaced Aristotle’s syllogisms as the central tool of modern Logic.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Logic: Russell and Mill
From here on out in the course, we will be studying modern European logic. Today we will examine the positivist position of Bertrand Russell and the skeptical position of John Stuart Mill, putting the positivist vs. skeptic duel into modern European times. I gave you several texts from Russell and Mill in your reader to give you the debate in the author’s words. Next class, we will begin studying Ludwig Wittgenstein and his truth table method.
As we have noted, in the ancient world logic was about the foundations of debate. In the modern world, particularly fueled by the success of algebraic code-breaking of nature (cryptography from Islamic civilization, discussed last time) logic became a mathematical language that many hoped would provide and prove the foundations of algebraic mathematics.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) is a big rationalist philosopher of the Anglo-American positivist tradition, a tradition that believes in doing the groundwork for facts. Thus, Russell often argues against Hegel, skepticism and instrumentalism (or Utilitarianism, the position of Mill next) by name as he does in the text.
First Text: Russell’s Problem of Induction
Russell says that we know the self and sense data exist. Interestingly, Descartes started modern European philosophy with a very similar position, though Descartes was similarly certain of a good and just God whereas Russell is a staunch atheist who believes in the positive truth of science, not religion.
Russell argues that if we want to know anything other than the immediate, we need to gather things in our conceptions into general principles. We can perceive lightning following thunder again and again, but we must draw a general principle from this if we want to know the relationship between the two. Notice this is exactly what the Nyaya sutra said about the relationship between induction and deduction.
Russell admits that this creates a problem (the central issue between positivism and skepticism, in fact): if we only know general principles by induction, then how can we know anything for certain? Russell takes the same position as Aristotle, and argues that we cannot be satisfied with mere opinion, but need knowledge of certain principles that are always true in order to have knowledge.
Russell says that science finds the laws of uniformity in nature, and thus gives us knowledge of certainties. Remember, science in Russell’s time has become algebraic code-breaking, and is not simply the observation of nature as it was in Gotama and Aristotle’s time, but Russell’s position is identical to that of Gotama in ancient India and Aristotle in ancient Greece. Russell argues that we need a founding principle, a starting point of certainty, or otherwise all of our sciences, including mathematics, are mere opinions. We must believe that there are certainties out there, and that our induction sometimes leads us to certain truth.
Unfortunately for Russell, he was writing the piece before the work of Einstein, when Newton’s laws of nature was the dominant view of science. Einstein’s work did much to swing scientists away from the use of the word “law” and toward use of the word “theory” to describe our conceptions of the regularities of nature. Another philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, would use the term “paradigm” to describe scientific conceptions in a similarly relativistic and non-positivistic light. As we will see, Mill would be quite happy by this change of language.
Second Text: Russell’s Empiricist Answer to Skepticism
Russell calls out Hegelians and skeptics by name and says we cannot get the sort of independent certainties we want to call facts or laws by these methods. He says we can indeed whittle away at our theories to get to the pure data, the facts without interpretation but as they must be. Wittgenstein will later use the metaphor of bedrock (like Russell uses a metaphor of whittling).
Russell has faith in a ‘minimal theory’, what people are trying to find with STRING theory. He gives the Hegelians and Skeptics that there is always SOME uncertainty in truth, some relations of views, institutions, room for error, but SOME DATA has “independent credibility”, meaning we know its ‘just true’, ‘right there’, and we CAN ASSUME correctly that this is true data or fact.
Some things must be more than opinion, as opinions can contradict each other but the true fact never contradicts itself or other things. We should give the greatest weight (note the use of metaphor, again) to that which is most regular and most certain, thus principles and propositions. This is the method which Russell believes answers the skeptic. Interestingly, the examples Russell uses suffer from the same problems that Aristotle had before, arguing that what is red cannot be blue (different times, parts, purple, etc).
As a positivist, Russell is a big believer in the Principle of Non-Contradiction (a statement must be true or false, but not both) and the Principle of the Excluded Middle or Bivalence (a statement must be either true or false, but not neither).
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), skeptic and Utilitarian, comes from the opposing side of the debate, very much against Russell’s arguments.
Utilitarianism, which Russell attacks as ‘Instrumentalism’ says that there is no truth to things other than how they are used. This is a very similar position to the “existentialism” of Avicenna and Ockham. Both sides agree that the world has regular patterns, and that we use our minds to come up with concepts of the regularities. However, Mill and utilitarians argue that we are often fooled by our use and concepts of things into thinking that we grasp the essence of the thing when in fact all we are doing is using and grasping.
As algebraic science made many new discoveries, it is interesting that human beings again split along positivist and skeptic lines. Does science show us that the truth is out there and can be discovered, or that we should always be suspicious of our certain truths because new truths can overturn the old truths?
Utilitarianism was a powerful force in Britain against more traditional thinkers like Russell, who is fighting back against Hegelian process theory and Utilitarian’s ‘its whatever we want to do with it or make of it’ theory. Russell believes that things are factually as they are, and we should be objective to have true knowledge. A Utilitarian would say we can arrange situations such that we have knowledge, but there is no ‘true view’, purpose or nature of things. For instance, Utilitarianism was very useful for feminism, that there is no ‘true position’ of women but it is however we position things such that they are most useful.
Third Text: Mill’s Logic & Mathematics
Mill asks: if we admit that all is induction (British Empiricism, which Russell embraces) then why do we say there are “exact sciences”? We also similarly say that there are ‘hard sciences’. He argues that this is an illusion due to the fact that objects of math are conceptions and thus imaginary, hence they have perfect straight edges like an ideally straight line. A perfectly straight line, the example he uses, with no width, like a point, cannot exist outside of the imagination. It is a real being of the world, but imaginary and not physical. Some (Russell) say without perfection of a sort there is no math, science or knowledge possible (eternal facts as well), but Mill argues this is silly as we have these things yet do not have an instance of a perfectly straight line in the real world.
Russell argued that we can strip down or “whittle” to the pure straight edged truth, but Mill argues that this helps us to focus our observation and thinking but it does nothing to guarantee that our knowledge is certain at all. We can ignore aspects of a thing to focus on particular aspects or parts, but this does not successfully or completely take these factors out of the picture, even as far as relevance to the parts that are in focus. This is a very important ground for the positivist/skeptic debate today. If we take a banana and put it in a lab, are we more or less capable of seeing its truths there? If we create abstractions about bananas with our minds, are these getting into the thing or away from it?
Russell wanted a first certain principle of non-contradiction to give us certainty. Mill argues that there are no first principles of geometry, mathematics or anything else. Mill argues that the ‘first principles’ are in fact simply generalized observations of real world situations. Mill turns specifically to the two principles of Non-Contradiction and Excluded Middle with this skepticism. These principles are in fact observation in practice. We can see that belief and disbelief oppose one another, that they are “oppositional mental states” just as we can see that opposing stories tend to mean that someone is somewhat mistaken. This is the simple contrast between any two opposites. Mill argues that the two principles are merely useful generalizations, as are all “true” concepts used by human beings whether scientists, philosophers or common folk.
The Problem of Self Referentiality is one of the most famous and interesting problems with the principles of Non-Contradiction and Excluded Middle. This problem was very important for Russell’s career, and it brought him both great success and frustration.
The classic example is the liar’s paradox. Consider the sentence, “This sentence is false”. According to non-contradiction, this must be either true or false but not both, but if it is true then it is false and if it is false then it is true. It cannot be fully resolved either way.
Russell pointed out a similar paradox in the work of Frege, the German analytic philosopher who was central in trying to turn Logic towards founding arithmetic, who Russell and then Wittgenstein followed and overturned (as Wittgenstein later did to his teacher Russell). Frege thought he could prove that mathematics is simply a system of non-contradictory sets, which he called Set Theory. Russell realized, however, that there are still contradictions possible in this system of mere sets. He asked, “Is the set of all sets which are not members of themselves a member of itself?” Just like the liar paradox, if it is, then it isn’t, and vice versa.
Russell’s point is that there is a paradox that results from self-reference (‘this sentence’ or ‘this set’). Russell tried to use Frege’s work to finish a foundation of math, which he never completed to his own satisfaction. He thought that he could come up with a ‘theory of types’ that would prevent the paradox (so a ‘set’ is of objects but a ‘type’ is a group of sets, not objects), but it lead to further paradoxes. At this time, he discovered a young Austrian genius who showed up at his office hours one day simply to argue endlessly against everything Russell said, who Russell believed would finish his work but in the end came to stand completely against proof theory: Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Recently, a different version of the liar’s paradox has been proposed that supposedly does not suffer from self-reference: consider two people standing next to each other, one with a sign that reads “Her sign is false” and another with a sign that reads, “His sign is true”. Like Russell’s theory of types, this version of the paradox tries to eliminate self-reference to tidy up the problem, but the paradox remains.
As we have noted, in the ancient world logic was about the foundations of debate. In the modern world, particularly fueled by the success of algebraic code-breaking of nature (cryptography from Islamic civilization, discussed last time) logic became a mathematical language that many hoped would provide and prove the foundations of algebraic mathematics.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) is a big rationalist philosopher of the Anglo-American positivist tradition, a tradition that believes in doing the groundwork for facts. Thus, Russell often argues against Hegel, skepticism and instrumentalism (or Utilitarianism, the position of Mill next) by name as he does in the text.
First Text: Russell’s Problem of Induction
Russell says that we know the self and sense data exist. Interestingly, Descartes started modern European philosophy with a very similar position, though Descartes was similarly certain of a good and just God whereas Russell is a staunch atheist who believes in the positive truth of science, not religion.
Russell argues that if we want to know anything other than the immediate, we need to gather things in our conceptions into general principles. We can perceive lightning following thunder again and again, but we must draw a general principle from this if we want to know the relationship between the two. Notice this is exactly what the Nyaya sutra said about the relationship between induction and deduction.
Russell admits that this creates a problem (the central issue between positivism and skepticism, in fact): if we only know general principles by induction, then how can we know anything for certain? Russell takes the same position as Aristotle, and argues that we cannot be satisfied with mere opinion, but need knowledge of certain principles that are always true in order to have knowledge.
Russell says that science finds the laws of uniformity in nature, and thus gives us knowledge of certainties. Remember, science in Russell’s time has become algebraic code-breaking, and is not simply the observation of nature as it was in Gotama and Aristotle’s time, but Russell’s position is identical to that of Gotama in ancient India and Aristotle in ancient Greece. Russell argues that we need a founding principle, a starting point of certainty, or otherwise all of our sciences, including mathematics, are mere opinions. We must believe that there are certainties out there, and that our induction sometimes leads us to certain truth.
Unfortunately for Russell, he was writing the piece before the work of Einstein, when Newton’s laws of nature was the dominant view of science. Einstein’s work did much to swing scientists away from the use of the word “law” and toward use of the word “theory” to describe our conceptions of the regularities of nature. Another philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, would use the term “paradigm” to describe scientific conceptions in a similarly relativistic and non-positivistic light. As we will see, Mill would be quite happy by this change of language.
Second Text: Russell’s Empiricist Answer to Skepticism
Russell calls out Hegelians and skeptics by name and says we cannot get the sort of independent certainties we want to call facts or laws by these methods. He says we can indeed whittle away at our theories to get to the pure data, the facts without interpretation but as they must be. Wittgenstein will later use the metaphor of bedrock (like Russell uses a metaphor of whittling).
Russell has faith in a ‘minimal theory’, what people are trying to find with STRING theory. He gives the Hegelians and Skeptics that there is always SOME uncertainty in truth, some relations of views, institutions, room for error, but SOME DATA has “independent credibility”, meaning we know its ‘just true’, ‘right there’, and we CAN ASSUME correctly that this is true data or fact.
Some things must be more than opinion, as opinions can contradict each other but the true fact never contradicts itself or other things. We should give the greatest weight (note the use of metaphor, again) to that which is most regular and most certain, thus principles and propositions. This is the method which Russell believes answers the skeptic. Interestingly, the examples Russell uses suffer from the same problems that Aristotle had before, arguing that what is red cannot be blue (different times, parts, purple, etc).
As a positivist, Russell is a big believer in the Principle of Non-Contradiction (a statement must be true or false, but not both) and the Principle of the Excluded Middle or Bivalence (a statement must be either true or false, but not neither).
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), skeptic and Utilitarian, comes from the opposing side of the debate, very much against Russell’s arguments.
Utilitarianism, which Russell attacks as ‘Instrumentalism’ says that there is no truth to things other than how they are used. This is a very similar position to the “existentialism” of Avicenna and Ockham. Both sides agree that the world has regular patterns, and that we use our minds to come up with concepts of the regularities. However, Mill and utilitarians argue that we are often fooled by our use and concepts of things into thinking that we grasp the essence of the thing when in fact all we are doing is using and grasping.
As algebraic science made many new discoveries, it is interesting that human beings again split along positivist and skeptic lines. Does science show us that the truth is out there and can be discovered, or that we should always be suspicious of our certain truths because new truths can overturn the old truths?
Utilitarianism was a powerful force in Britain against more traditional thinkers like Russell, who is fighting back against Hegelian process theory and Utilitarian’s ‘its whatever we want to do with it or make of it’ theory. Russell believes that things are factually as they are, and we should be objective to have true knowledge. A Utilitarian would say we can arrange situations such that we have knowledge, but there is no ‘true view’, purpose or nature of things. For instance, Utilitarianism was very useful for feminism, that there is no ‘true position’ of women but it is however we position things such that they are most useful.
Third Text: Mill’s Logic & Mathematics
Mill asks: if we admit that all is induction (British Empiricism, which Russell embraces) then why do we say there are “exact sciences”? We also similarly say that there are ‘hard sciences’. He argues that this is an illusion due to the fact that objects of math are conceptions and thus imaginary, hence they have perfect straight edges like an ideally straight line. A perfectly straight line, the example he uses, with no width, like a point, cannot exist outside of the imagination. It is a real being of the world, but imaginary and not physical. Some (Russell) say without perfection of a sort there is no math, science or knowledge possible (eternal facts as well), but Mill argues this is silly as we have these things yet do not have an instance of a perfectly straight line in the real world.
Russell argued that we can strip down or “whittle” to the pure straight edged truth, but Mill argues that this helps us to focus our observation and thinking but it does nothing to guarantee that our knowledge is certain at all. We can ignore aspects of a thing to focus on particular aspects or parts, but this does not successfully or completely take these factors out of the picture, even as far as relevance to the parts that are in focus. This is a very important ground for the positivist/skeptic debate today. If we take a banana and put it in a lab, are we more or less capable of seeing its truths there? If we create abstractions about bananas with our minds, are these getting into the thing or away from it?
Russell wanted a first certain principle of non-contradiction to give us certainty. Mill argues that there are no first principles of geometry, mathematics or anything else. Mill argues that the ‘first principles’ are in fact simply generalized observations of real world situations. Mill turns specifically to the two principles of Non-Contradiction and Excluded Middle with this skepticism. These principles are in fact observation in practice. We can see that belief and disbelief oppose one another, that they are “oppositional mental states” just as we can see that opposing stories tend to mean that someone is somewhat mistaken. This is the simple contrast between any two opposites. Mill argues that the two principles are merely useful generalizations, as are all “true” concepts used by human beings whether scientists, philosophers or common folk.
The Problem of Self Referentiality is one of the most famous and interesting problems with the principles of Non-Contradiction and Excluded Middle. This problem was very important for Russell’s career, and it brought him both great success and frustration.
The classic example is the liar’s paradox. Consider the sentence, “This sentence is false”. According to non-contradiction, this must be either true or false but not both, but if it is true then it is false and if it is false then it is true. It cannot be fully resolved either way.
Russell pointed out a similar paradox in the work of Frege, the German analytic philosopher who was central in trying to turn Logic towards founding arithmetic, who Russell and then Wittgenstein followed and overturned (as Wittgenstein later did to his teacher Russell). Frege thought he could prove that mathematics is simply a system of non-contradictory sets, which he called Set Theory. Russell realized, however, that there are still contradictions possible in this system of mere sets. He asked, “Is the set of all sets which are not members of themselves a member of itself?” Just like the liar paradox, if it is, then it isn’t, and vice versa.
Russell’s point is that there is a paradox that results from self-reference (‘this sentence’ or ‘this set’). Russell tried to use Frege’s work to finish a foundation of math, which he never completed to his own satisfaction. He thought that he could come up with a ‘theory of types’ that would prevent the paradox (so a ‘set’ is of objects but a ‘type’ is a group of sets, not objects), but it lead to further paradoxes. At this time, he discovered a young Austrian genius who showed up at his office hours one day simply to argue endlessly against everything Russell said, who Russell believed would finish his work but in the end came to stand completely against proof theory: Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Recently, a different version of the liar’s paradox has been proposed that supposedly does not suffer from self-reference: consider two people standing next to each other, one with a sign that reads “Her sign is false” and another with a sign that reads, “His sign is true”. Like Russell’s theory of types, this version of the paradox tries to eliminate self-reference to tidy up the problem, but the paradox remains.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Ethics: Lies & Propaganda
Individuals and groups manipulate the truth to serve their own ends, in a conscious/unconscious way that often resembles denial. Speech means that we can tell the truth or tell lies. This has been an issue for humans before they were even human, like theft and violence.
Apes and Lying:
In one of the most fascinating stories of ape behavior I have heard, researchers documented that a young male baboon made the mistake of trying to force himself sexually on a high ranking female baboon of his tribe. When the female screeched, the rest of the tribe began chasing the young male along the ground floor. Suddenly, the young male turned and gave the call for leopard. The chasers dashed up into the trees and out of sight, while the young male stood, watching them leave, on the ground in no danger from any leopard. The researchers concluded that they had witnessed and documented an ape lying to save his own skin. Thus, we can assume, humans have been lying since before they were human.
Children and Lying:
Interestingly, we believe in lying to children as a matter of raising them. Children before the age of seven are quite incapable of telling the difference between fiction and reality or understanding sarcasm. This is why young children believe in Santa and wonder where Thomas the Train Engine lives.
There are two amusing stories I have on this. One of my students in a response paper wrote that as a young girl she had a pet goldfish and accidentally killed the fish by cleaning its bowl with hand soap. When she saw her fish was dead her mother, who did not want to torture the young girl with the truth, told her that the cat had walked by and the fish had a heart attack. Notice the utilitarianism here, and that Kant would be mortified. Secondly, there was a news story last year about a boy in Thailand who was stuck on the roof of a tall building, and he would not climb into the arms of the police who ascended a ladder to rescue him. One of the police dressed up in a Spiderman costume, and the boy threw open his arms and leapt into the waiting embrace of Spiderman, who carried him down to a cheering crowd.
Children believe in superheroes and villains. One would like to think that the use of heroes and myths ends with childhood, but the literature on propaganda tells us that all civilizations make myths that glorify themselves and demonize their enemies, both internal and external. Because children are raised with these myths, they often do not think to question them even when they are quite past the age of seven.
Consider the use of superheroes in comics, fighting criminals at home and enemies of America.
Watchmen is a good look at some of these dynamics. Consider that Iron Man was originally from Korea, then the recent movie puts him in the middle east. We still use superheroes to stand for “truth, justice and the American way”, but we have subtler ways. I think you can look at Iron Man and the new Batman movie and see distortions that we not only pass on to kids and teenagers but the adults in the audience as well.
City States and Rock Edicts:
The Assyrians were masters of propaganda, and they were one of the oldest civilizations on the planet. Most of their conquest was through trade, though they invented all of the siege weapons used through the European middle ages. Rock edicts, tall carvings in cliffs and on monuments, declared glorious meanings for the common people to consume. Interestingly, the common people could not read, and someone who could read and pass the messages to others was called “one who makes the stones speak”. Just like a modern textbook, the human authors are lost and the media simply speaks for itself.
Here we come to the old and the new style of propaganda. The old propaganda model is simple, and it is still in use particularly by traditional and communist countries: We are the King/State, we tell you what you need to know, namely that we look after you and our enemies are evil. WE are the great multicultural empire that looks after everyone (Assyrian did not denote a race, but a citizen of the empire), but our enemies will oppress you and kill you for no good reason. Very little has changed over several thousand years.
The new propaganda is even more effective, and strangely it does not call itself propaganda at all. In China today, the communist government says openly that they use propaganda to educate the people, and the same was admitted in the United States and Britain until just this last century. The government tells you “brush your teeth, it is good for you” and this is acknowledged as a message coming from authorities telling you what you should know and do. Chomsky, who we will study today, is quite clear on this point, as is Bernays. Propaganda only recently became something evil, something that the enemy does.
I am going to focus on American propaganda from WWI through the Cold War, and then talk about Chomsky’s theories on propaganda models and the American media’s role in American empire and economics.
Hegel tells us when we haven’t looked into an issue, perspectives are polarized. Here in America, similarly in Britain, it is thought that we are free and love democracy, but other cultures (especially the Germans in WWI and II, the Russians in the Cold War, and Islamic extremists) are not civilized but rather lie as much as they can because ‘they hate our freedom’.
We have failed to have a real discussion about censorship and bias in America. This means ‘THEY’ are simply biased and put forth propaganda, and WE would never do something like that. This is not only the basic human frame as before, but Americans and British got set in this in a particular way through WWI and II. In WWI, propaganda became something the Germans do, not the Belgians, British or Americans. In WWII, the Germans and Japanese do propaganda, and in the cold war the Russians. The British and Americans, however, would never do ‘propaganda’ by name, as they are the champions of liberty, democracy and freedom from tyranny (even as Britain and then America plundered and sought empire in the same way that the Germans, Russians did). Today, this is ‘Islam and the West’ where we have unbiased journalism while they simply put forward obvious propaganda (watch ‘Control Room’ for the best of this).
What we need? We need to see how people censor and authority is abusive in comparison, and this is what is never done. Rather than hear one line of Chinese media through ours and say “Propaganda!” we need to compare censorship operation by the government in both places and see the complex similarities and differences. I am going to show human overall consistencies while describing the particular way that Americans are involved in the inscription of messages and ideology in our society. That way, we get beyond the strange complex of saying that in America there is no propaganda while living in an America that knows how to sell and spin professionally better than anyone ever has.
WWI (the British/Americans vs. the Germans)
The Germans invade Belgium, and the British make up all sorts of things. The Germans become the evil Hun, and the Belgians the poor victim, even though they had just gotten bad world press by systematically killing 10 million Africans in the Congo.
The British run propaganda in America to get us into the war, and teach us the techniques of British style empire and propaganda. You set up ‘free’ reporters to say your messages, rather than do the old way like Germany and Russia with a Ministry of Propaganda.
Thus, after the horrors of WWI, ‘propaganda’ became a bad word in Britain and America.
Since then, we do not do propaganda at all. We do ‘education’, ‘information’, ‘public relations’, ‘human relations’, and in time of war we may engage in psychological warfare, but we never do ‘propaganda’.
Propaganda is not an evil conspiracy. Consider great example of guy who did ‘Birth of a Nation’, KKK film, being jailed for 10 years for his next movie showing British and Natives committing war crimes against Americans.
Basically, the British and Americans lied as much as possible about German atrocities, the French and British took most of what Germany had after WWI, the Germans fell even lower in the 20s with the market crash, and they came back as the Nazis, NOW as bad as the British and Americans had led others to believe.
Consider that Irish newspapers in NY were shut down for telling people that the British have been evil in Ireland, Scotland, India, Africa, all while calling themselves the defenders of democracy and freedom. At this time, government censorship during time of war was unquestioned (story about Pentagon lifting ban on coffins today).
Bernays book Propaganda:
Chomsky says that Bernays was one of the first propaganda specialists in America and he is quite open about praising the use of propaganda. Bernays says, during WWI, that it is remarkable that the moment America propaganda explodes (advertising, PR), becomes a necessary tool of corporations, it becomes ‘evil’ in name. PR went from being Barnum and Bailey to every corporation running spin and ad campaigns. Bernays invented the committee of Doctors who tell you to eat eggs and bacon for a ‘hearty’ breakfast, saying old way is ‘Eat Bacon!’, new way: ‘Drs say, ‘Eat bacon’’. This is ‘free expert’ style of propaganda.
In 1938, writing his book, Bernays says that half the front page of NYT is identifiably propaganda, stories planted by interested parties. He says the NAACP is a great PR group, and show a strong hand holding their annual conference in Atlanta. He got out of cigarette ads in the 40s, tabloids having picked up on the health risks. It wasn’t till the 1970s that major media carried the story at all. 1953 Bernays helped United Fruit convince everyone that Guatemala was a communist threat, so the US overthrew the elected leader with a CIA coup and we supported dictatorship there for cheap labor to supply Americans with cheaper fruit.
Nazis and WWII:
Hitler says: We did not have as good propaganda as the British and Americans, but next time will be different. Nazi TV, engineering goes to American, America rises above Britain in wake of WWII. During WWII, the Americans and British praised Stalin and his Red Army as they all fought the Nazis. Then, as soon as the war was over, the British led the Americans in the Cold War anti-communism campaign. This is where stuff gets REALLY INTERESTING: US vs. Soviet Union. Both say, ‘THEY do all of this, so WE HAVE TO’, in the official channels, but the story for the masses is: only THEY would do that.
COLD WAR
The following material is drawn largely from the book The Cultural Cold War by Saunders.
Post WWII, the French and Russians had largely convinced everyone that America has no culture, only cheap commercialism, and America talks a lot about Freedom, but look at how they treat black people. US and Soviets started ‘Congresses’, (Soviets for World Peace, US for Cultural Freedom). It is now know that these were the two big umbrella groups for a lot of fronts for propaganda campaigns. These groups used historians, scientists, poets, artists, philosophers, professors, you name it, to give the impression that individuals were lining up against ‘the evil’ of the other. The US wanted to fight the ‘French Flu’ and push European intellectuals away from Marxism as liberation towards free market capitalism as liberation. Ex: US intellectual goes to Paris, gives a talk about the ‘Negro’s progress in America’. Then when he is heckled (“possibly by communists”), brings out black band to do jazz all night.
US used CIA and many fronts to tour black performers through Europe, increase publication of certain books (Camus, not Sartre example, Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, introductions written to spin Animal Farm and 1984 by Orwell, who hated both). The idea was to promote the NONCOMMUNIST LEFT. (Sartre and Merleau-Ponty not studied in America, as they boycotted Congress of Cultural Freedom invitations due to US treatment of Black people).
The US had spent $34 million on this by 1950 (also, wealthiest country at this point, passing Britain in financing the rebuilding of Britain, Germany and France). The money quadrupled in rate of expense after 1950, as China became the world’s largest communist country. The CIA set up French literature reviews, toured the Boston symphony orchestra, approached wealthy individuals about setting up art collections that praise US art and European art that honors the US.
Pollock and others (though communists) praised and toured through Europe to show that American has genius painters after all. Agent as director stockpiled abstract minimalist art at the NY Moma (Contemporary Chinese art exhibit in Berkeley today). The Ford and Rockefeller foundations remain serious fronts for money dispensed in America to artists, writers and performers who do work that promotes America even as it is avant-garde art.
At home, Billy Graham got money knowingly from intelligence, toured America telling Christians that ‘Communism is masterminded by Satan’, never mind that the first communes were French Christian communes. John Wayne and Ronald Reagan were promoted as Soldier/Cowboys, both spied for the FBI against communism at home for the house of un-American activities committee of McCarthy. Disney and Warner brothers made cartoons for the US in WWII, then denounced their writers and animators as communists when they went on strike. Disney spied for the FBI, testified for HUAC, while he was doing illegal things to his workers like sending strike breakers to beat people up and the FBI looked the other way.
In films, token black people began appearing well before the civil rights movement. Documents of agents who worked with studios on scripts say, ‘took out a drunk, added a black person’. One of the best examples is a black golfer and caddy added into the background of a scene on a golf course, at a time when white Catholics and Jews had a rough time getting into golf clubs. Consider that the civil rights movement was partly started by seeing token black people in the cinema, like the golfer and caddy, and wondering aloud why this could not become a real lived reality. Both US and Soviets fought over who liberates and who oppresses. In 1956, the ‘Melting Pot’ became a slogan for the US. We can see that many Russian films and Korean propaganda posters deplore the evils that America has done to black people as a simple tactic.
Today, if your movie has anything to do with police or military, they will give you heavy support as long as they go over the script and ok it. Six media owner companies means each needs a cushy relationship with both cops and military. That means: America is well aware of the streamlined view of America put out all over the world in TV and Movies. They are the BEST form of propaganda. There are consulting firms who specialize in getting your script ready for police and military approval, so that you do not get charged extra by the official government representatives who review the scripts for a fee.
Meanwhile, stories pepper the news about how “Iran censors movies” and “China might be censoring the internet”. No further detail is drawn. This is the British/American style: THEY simply censor, without any comparison of us and them. THEY censor (so, we don’t?). Recently the media corporations agreed with the government not to show footage of coffins coming home from the war. Is there ever a need for a conspiracy when power works the way it always has?
Chomsky and Herman’s MANUFACTURING CONSENT:
There is no better book on American propaganda and the stories both promoted and ignored by the American media. The book argues that the mass-media protects the interest of the wealthy and powerful individuals and institutions in America by promoting particular views and filtering out others. This process involves the ownership of media groups, the reliance of media on the government for information and support, the reliance of media on advertising revenue, flak heaped upon dissident views (particularly socialist views and those critical of business interests).
Apes and Lying:
In one of the most fascinating stories of ape behavior I have heard, researchers documented that a young male baboon made the mistake of trying to force himself sexually on a high ranking female baboon of his tribe. When the female screeched, the rest of the tribe began chasing the young male along the ground floor. Suddenly, the young male turned and gave the call for leopard. The chasers dashed up into the trees and out of sight, while the young male stood, watching them leave, on the ground in no danger from any leopard. The researchers concluded that they had witnessed and documented an ape lying to save his own skin. Thus, we can assume, humans have been lying since before they were human.
Children and Lying:
Interestingly, we believe in lying to children as a matter of raising them. Children before the age of seven are quite incapable of telling the difference between fiction and reality or understanding sarcasm. This is why young children believe in Santa and wonder where Thomas the Train Engine lives.
There are two amusing stories I have on this. One of my students in a response paper wrote that as a young girl she had a pet goldfish and accidentally killed the fish by cleaning its bowl with hand soap. When she saw her fish was dead her mother, who did not want to torture the young girl with the truth, told her that the cat had walked by and the fish had a heart attack. Notice the utilitarianism here, and that Kant would be mortified. Secondly, there was a news story last year about a boy in Thailand who was stuck on the roof of a tall building, and he would not climb into the arms of the police who ascended a ladder to rescue him. One of the police dressed up in a Spiderman costume, and the boy threw open his arms and leapt into the waiting embrace of Spiderman, who carried him down to a cheering crowd.
Children believe in superheroes and villains. One would like to think that the use of heroes and myths ends with childhood, but the literature on propaganda tells us that all civilizations make myths that glorify themselves and demonize their enemies, both internal and external. Because children are raised with these myths, they often do not think to question them even when they are quite past the age of seven.
Consider the use of superheroes in comics, fighting criminals at home and enemies of America.
Watchmen is a good look at some of these dynamics. Consider that Iron Man was originally from Korea, then the recent movie puts him in the middle east. We still use superheroes to stand for “truth, justice and the American way”, but we have subtler ways. I think you can look at Iron Man and the new Batman movie and see distortions that we not only pass on to kids and teenagers but the adults in the audience as well.
City States and Rock Edicts:
The Assyrians were masters of propaganda, and they were one of the oldest civilizations on the planet. Most of their conquest was through trade, though they invented all of the siege weapons used through the European middle ages. Rock edicts, tall carvings in cliffs and on monuments, declared glorious meanings for the common people to consume. Interestingly, the common people could not read, and someone who could read and pass the messages to others was called “one who makes the stones speak”. Just like a modern textbook, the human authors are lost and the media simply speaks for itself.
Here we come to the old and the new style of propaganda. The old propaganda model is simple, and it is still in use particularly by traditional and communist countries: We are the King/State, we tell you what you need to know, namely that we look after you and our enemies are evil. WE are the great multicultural empire that looks after everyone (Assyrian did not denote a race, but a citizen of the empire), but our enemies will oppress you and kill you for no good reason. Very little has changed over several thousand years.
The new propaganda is even more effective, and strangely it does not call itself propaganda at all. In China today, the communist government says openly that they use propaganda to educate the people, and the same was admitted in the United States and Britain until just this last century. The government tells you “brush your teeth, it is good for you” and this is acknowledged as a message coming from authorities telling you what you should know and do. Chomsky, who we will study today, is quite clear on this point, as is Bernays. Propaganda only recently became something evil, something that the enemy does.
I am going to focus on American propaganda from WWI through the Cold War, and then talk about Chomsky’s theories on propaganda models and the American media’s role in American empire and economics.
Hegel tells us when we haven’t looked into an issue, perspectives are polarized. Here in America, similarly in Britain, it is thought that we are free and love democracy, but other cultures (especially the Germans in WWI and II, the Russians in the Cold War, and Islamic extremists) are not civilized but rather lie as much as they can because ‘they hate our freedom’.
We have failed to have a real discussion about censorship and bias in America. This means ‘THEY’ are simply biased and put forth propaganda, and WE would never do something like that. This is not only the basic human frame as before, but Americans and British got set in this in a particular way through WWI and II. In WWI, propaganda became something the Germans do, not the Belgians, British or Americans. In WWII, the Germans and Japanese do propaganda, and in the cold war the Russians. The British and Americans, however, would never do ‘propaganda’ by name, as they are the champions of liberty, democracy and freedom from tyranny (even as Britain and then America plundered and sought empire in the same way that the Germans, Russians did). Today, this is ‘Islam and the West’ where we have unbiased journalism while they simply put forward obvious propaganda (watch ‘Control Room’ for the best of this).
What we need? We need to see how people censor and authority is abusive in comparison, and this is what is never done. Rather than hear one line of Chinese media through ours and say “Propaganda!” we need to compare censorship operation by the government in both places and see the complex similarities and differences. I am going to show human overall consistencies while describing the particular way that Americans are involved in the inscription of messages and ideology in our society. That way, we get beyond the strange complex of saying that in America there is no propaganda while living in an America that knows how to sell and spin professionally better than anyone ever has.
WWI (the British/Americans vs. the Germans)
The Germans invade Belgium, and the British make up all sorts of things. The Germans become the evil Hun, and the Belgians the poor victim, even though they had just gotten bad world press by systematically killing 10 million Africans in the Congo.
The British run propaganda in America to get us into the war, and teach us the techniques of British style empire and propaganda. You set up ‘free’ reporters to say your messages, rather than do the old way like Germany and Russia with a Ministry of Propaganda.
Thus, after the horrors of WWI, ‘propaganda’ became a bad word in Britain and America.
Since then, we do not do propaganda at all. We do ‘education’, ‘information’, ‘public relations’, ‘human relations’, and in time of war we may engage in psychological warfare, but we never do ‘propaganda’.
Propaganda is not an evil conspiracy. Consider great example of guy who did ‘Birth of a Nation’, KKK film, being jailed for 10 years for his next movie showing British and Natives committing war crimes against Americans.
Basically, the British and Americans lied as much as possible about German atrocities, the French and British took most of what Germany had after WWI, the Germans fell even lower in the 20s with the market crash, and they came back as the Nazis, NOW as bad as the British and Americans had led others to believe.
Consider that Irish newspapers in NY were shut down for telling people that the British have been evil in Ireland, Scotland, India, Africa, all while calling themselves the defenders of democracy and freedom. At this time, government censorship during time of war was unquestioned (story about Pentagon lifting ban on coffins today).
Bernays book Propaganda:
Chomsky says that Bernays was one of the first propaganda specialists in America and he is quite open about praising the use of propaganda. Bernays says, during WWI, that it is remarkable that the moment America propaganda explodes (advertising, PR), becomes a necessary tool of corporations, it becomes ‘evil’ in name. PR went from being Barnum and Bailey to every corporation running spin and ad campaigns. Bernays invented the committee of Doctors who tell you to eat eggs and bacon for a ‘hearty’ breakfast, saying old way is ‘Eat Bacon!’, new way: ‘Drs say, ‘Eat bacon’’. This is ‘free expert’ style of propaganda.
In 1938, writing his book, Bernays says that half the front page of NYT is identifiably propaganda, stories planted by interested parties. He says the NAACP is a great PR group, and show a strong hand holding their annual conference in Atlanta. He got out of cigarette ads in the 40s, tabloids having picked up on the health risks. It wasn’t till the 1970s that major media carried the story at all. 1953 Bernays helped United Fruit convince everyone that Guatemala was a communist threat, so the US overthrew the elected leader with a CIA coup and we supported dictatorship there for cheap labor to supply Americans with cheaper fruit.
Nazis and WWII:
Hitler says: We did not have as good propaganda as the British and Americans, but next time will be different. Nazi TV, engineering goes to American, America rises above Britain in wake of WWII. During WWII, the Americans and British praised Stalin and his Red Army as they all fought the Nazis. Then, as soon as the war was over, the British led the Americans in the Cold War anti-communism campaign. This is where stuff gets REALLY INTERESTING: US vs. Soviet Union. Both say, ‘THEY do all of this, so WE HAVE TO’, in the official channels, but the story for the masses is: only THEY would do that.
COLD WAR
The following material is drawn largely from the book The Cultural Cold War by Saunders.
Post WWII, the French and Russians had largely convinced everyone that America has no culture, only cheap commercialism, and America talks a lot about Freedom, but look at how they treat black people. US and Soviets started ‘Congresses’, (Soviets for World Peace, US for Cultural Freedom). It is now know that these were the two big umbrella groups for a lot of fronts for propaganda campaigns. These groups used historians, scientists, poets, artists, philosophers, professors, you name it, to give the impression that individuals were lining up against ‘the evil’ of the other. The US wanted to fight the ‘French Flu’ and push European intellectuals away from Marxism as liberation towards free market capitalism as liberation. Ex: US intellectual goes to Paris, gives a talk about the ‘Negro’s progress in America’. Then when he is heckled (“possibly by communists”), brings out black band to do jazz all night.
US used CIA and many fronts to tour black performers through Europe, increase publication of certain books (Camus, not Sartre example, Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, introductions written to spin Animal Farm and 1984 by Orwell, who hated both). The idea was to promote the NONCOMMUNIST LEFT. (Sartre and Merleau-Ponty not studied in America, as they boycotted Congress of Cultural Freedom invitations due to US treatment of Black people).
The US had spent $34 million on this by 1950 (also, wealthiest country at this point, passing Britain in financing the rebuilding of Britain, Germany and France). The money quadrupled in rate of expense after 1950, as China became the world’s largest communist country. The CIA set up French literature reviews, toured the Boston symphony orchestra, approached wealthy individuals about setting up art collections that praise US art and European art that honors the US.
Pollock and others (though communists) praised and toured through Europe to show that American has genius painters after all. Agent as director stockpiled abstract minimalist art at the NY Moma (Contemporary Chinese art exhibit in Berkeley today). The Ford and Rockefeller foundations remain serious fronts for money dispensed in America to artists, writers and performers who do work that promotes America even as it is avant-garde art.
At home, Billy Graham got money knowingly from intelligence, toured America telling Christians that ‘Communism is masterminded by Satan’, never mind that the first communes were French Christian communes. John Wayne and Ronald Reagan were promoted as Soldier/Cowboys, both spied for the FBI against communism at home for the house of un-American activities committee of McCarthy. Disney and Warner brothers made cartoons for the US in WWII, then denounced their writers and animators as communists when they went on strike. Disney spied for the FBI, testified for HUAC, while he was doing illegal things to his workers like sending strike breakers to beat people up and the FBI looked the other way.
In films, token black people began appearing well before the civil rights movement. Documents of agents who worked with studios on scripts say, ‘took out a drunk, added a black person’. One of the best examples is a black golfer and caddy added into the background of a scene on a golf course, at a time when white Catholics and Jews had a rough time getting into golf clubs. Consider that the civil rights movement was partly started by seeing token black people in the cinema, like the golfer and caddy, and wondering aloud why this could not become a real lived reality. Both US and Soviets fought over who liberates and who oppresses. In 1956, the ‘Melting Pot’ became a slogan for the US. We can see that many Russian films and Korean propaganda posters deplore the evils that America has done to black people as a simple tactic.
Today, if your movie has anything to do with police or military, they will give you heavy support as long as they go over the script and ok it. Six media owner companies means each needs a cushy relationship with both cops and military. That means: America is well aware of the streamlined view of America put out all over the world in TV and Movies. They are the BEST form of propaganda. There are consulting firms who specialize in getting your script ready for police and military approval, so that you do not get charged extra by the official government representatives who review the scripts for a fee.
Meanwhile, stories pepper the news about how “Iran censors movies” and “China might be censoring the internet”. No further detail is drawn. This is the British/American style: THEY simply censor, without any comparison of us and them. THEY censor (so, we don’t?). Recently the media corporations agreed with the government not to show footage of coffins coming home from the war. Is there ever a need for a conspiracy when power works the way it always has?
Chomsky and Herman’s MANUFACTURING CONSENT:
There is no better book on American propaganda and the stories both promoted and ignored by the American media. The book argues that the mass-media protects the interest of the wealthy and powerful individuals and institutions in America by promoting particular views and filtering out others. This process involves the ownership of media groups, the reliance of media on the government for information and support, the reliance of media on advertising revenue, flak heaped upon dissident views (particularly socialist views and those critical of business interests).
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